Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda ... · ESS studies a changing Europe 5 Innovative ways of ... Tom Emery, Anne Gauthier, Minna van Gerven, Valentijn Gilissen,

Neelie Kroes, Vice President of

the European Commission

responsible for Europe’s Digital

Agenda, has strong views on the

role of the social sciences and

humanities (SSH) in today’s

society. Erica Renckens

“Society is not inert, waiting for technologicalinnovation. Rather, it is an active innovationagent engaging with technologies in a way thatoften goes far beyond the intentions of theengineers, and that's when innovation reallyhappens! Experts in social sciences andhumanities can help policy makers andengineers to harness this vibrant societalintelligence.” That’s why Kroes supports e-science in the SSH: “Under the upcomingH2020 funding program for Research andInnovation we encouragethe integration of SSHconsiderations in ICTresearch. We even have aspecific cross-cutting topic ‘Human-centricDigital Age’ where we aim to support futurework on integrating SSH knowledge with ICTinnovation in all areas.”

Strong focus“Today we have the technology to enableuniversal availability and connectivity of all thecultural artefacts of the past in unprecedentedways. Imagine every piece of paper, every bitof text on any medium, from the 19th centurybackwards, just a few clicks away. This willallow us to bring to life and explore our sharedpast in a breadth and depth never seen before,which has clear implications for Europe and the

work on our European identities.”“The Netherlands is already very active inresearch infrastructures, particularly e-infra-structures. To mention only a few examples:Amsterdam hosts the EGI, the European GridInitiative. SURF is a highly innovative NationalResearch and Education Network that providesDutch scientists with extremely fast access toresearch resources, and recently the CartesiusSupercomputer was installed at SURFsara,which demonstrates once again how Dutch

2Data and tools forlanguage research

3CLARIN and DARIAHblend into CLARIAH

4ESS studies a changingEurope

5Innovative ways of datacollection

6A digital revolution inhumanities

7Family relationshipsprimary focus in GGP

8Collaborations improveresearch infrastructures

Special Issue2014

Newsletter on dataand research in theSocial Sciences andHumanities.

E-data & Research ispublished three times a year.This Special Issue issponsored by CentERdata,CLARIAH, DANS and NIDI.

E-DATA &RESEARCH

E-DATA & RESEARCH SPECIAL ISSUE 2014 1

Use your smart-phone to scan thisQR-code and visitour websiteedata.nl

Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda:

‘Potential for newresearch is enormous’

Until recently, museums,archives and libraries werethe only large facilities usedby researchers from theSocial Sciences and Humani-ties (SSH). But the digitisa-tion of SSH research hasbrought about new needs.Peter Doorn

Research infrastructures havebecome mainstream in the naturaland life sciences: particleaccelerators for physicists,telescopes for astronomers, nuclearicebreakers for polar researchers.Since the SSH came to rely heavilyon information technology,however, the ‘virtual laboratories’

for these disciplines have becomepart of the same league as the real-world labs in chemistry andphysics: digital places where largenumbers of researchers share theirdata and tools.

No ‘one size fits all’An important factor in thistransition was the formulation of aRoadmap by the European StrategyForum on Research Infrastructures(ESFRI) in 2006; for the first time,this Roadmap included proposalswith regard to the SSH. In theNetherlands, the 2005 NWO BIGprogramme and the firstNetherlands Roadmap for Large-Scale Research Facilities (2008)

also embodied a breakthrough byincluding SSH proposals.Why are one or two researchinfrastructures not enough for theSSH? The silliness of this questionbecomes apparent as soon as weturn it around: why not have oneresearch infrastructure for thenatural sciences? You cannot lookat the stars with a nuclearicebreaker and you cannot break icewith a telescope. The SSH are justas heterogeneous as the natural andlife sciences, and therefore one toolor virtual lab does not fit alldemands.

Jungle of acronymsStill, the SSH were among the first

to understand the logic ofcollaboration. In the Netherlandsthe two European-wideinfrastructures CLARIN andDARIAH decided to join forces andthey even merged their acronyms toform CLARIAH. The same goes forSHARE and LISS/MESS in the socialsciences. Even collaborationsembracing the entire SSH domainhave emerged, such as DASISH,which is there to solve commonchallenges.In the brave new world of researchinfrastructures the reader may getlost in a jungle of acronyms, likeESS, GGP and CESSDA. This specialedition of E-data & Research aimsto make them a bit more familiar.

Why the Social Sciences and Humanitiesneed research infrastructures

CONTENTS

INTERVIEW

Neelie KroesNeelie Kroes studied Economics at ErasmusUniversity in Rotterdam. She was a Memberof the Dutch Parliament and served asMinister for Transport, Public Works andTelecommunication before she was appointedPresident of Neyenrode University. Since2004, she has been a member of theEuropean Commission, currently as VicePresident responsible for Europe’s DigitalAgenda.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

Neelie Kroes is responsible for Europe’s Digital Agenda photo Peter Elenbaas / Hollandse Hoogte

2 SPECIAL ISSUE 2014 E-DATA & RESEARCH

COLOPHON Publisher: Stichting Uitgeverij E-data & Research Den Haag. Editorial address: Postbus 93067, 2509 AB Den Haag, +31(0)70-3494450, [email protected], edata.nl. Editor in chief: Erica Renckens.Editorial secretariat: Lucas Pasteuning. Corrector: Pieter Wijker. Contributors to this issue: Kees Aarts, Patricia Alkhoven, Inge Angevaare, Sjef Barbiers, Heidi Berkhout, Leen Breurs, Siobhan Bright, Marika de Bruijne,Carl-Christian Buhr, Sally Chambers, Marcel Das, Peter Doorn, Petra Drenth, Tom Emery, Anne Gauthier, Minna van Gerven, Valentijn Gilissen, Henk Harmsen, Hella Hollander, René van Horik, Gerbert Kraaykamp, KeesMandemakers, Carlos Morais-Pires, Jan Odijk, Johan Oomen, Roeland Ordelman, Marieke Polhout, Paul Post, Hugo Quené, Laurent Romary, Nicoline van der Sijs, Steamwork Graphics, Heiko Tjalsma, Piek Vossen. Layout:Colette Sloots. Production and press: Quantes, Rijswijk. Circulation: 10.000. ISSN: 1872-0374. We have tried to approach all stakeholders regarding the images used. Those who believe they may assert rights can turn to us.

Interviews, novels, news-papers, speech recordings:language resources play animportant role in the humani-ties and social sciences.CLARIN makes these dataavailable to scholars.Jan Odijk

CLARIN is a European initiative tobuild an infrastructure for socialsciences and humanities resear-chers who make use of languageresources. In the Netherlands, thefocus of the national CLARINproject is on humanities resear-chers working with textualresources. CLARIN-NL will offerscholars the tools to allowcomputer-aided language proces-sing with a view to addressing oneor more of the multiple roleslanguage plays in the humanities.Examples of these roles are‘carrier of cultural content andknowledge’, ‘instrument ofcommunication’, ‘a component ofidentity’ and ‘an object of study’.

Ensuring accessibilityA key aspect of the infrastructureis that both the resources and thetools to work with them are easyto find and accessible. Moreover,the infrastructure should betailored to the average humanitiesscholar, meaning that the requiredICT knowledge to use the toolsand resources should be moderate.To achieve this goal, resources andtools are being standardised sothat they can be used togetherseamlessly; the tools are equipped

with user-friendly interfaces.In a range of demonstration andcuration projects, humanitiesscholars, ICT experts and dataproviders collaborate to makeresources available in the CLARINinfrastructure and to show thepotential of certain technologies orcurated data. Curation impliesstandardisation of resources inaccordance with CLARIN require-

ments, addition of CMDI metadata,ensuring findability and accessi-bility and making provisions forlong-term storage.clarin.nl

Online gateway to language resources

COLUMN

That’s why we use the HPC cloudof the SURFSara infrastructure tohave batches processed in parallelby Virtual Machines (VMs) onwhich the full range of moduleshas been installed. This makes iteasier to deploy more VMs ifneeded – as long as theinfrastructure allows it. Using thisconfiguration, we recently

processed 66,000 news articles inone week. We are experimentingwith parallelisation of the processand optimisation of theinfrastructure at SURFSara. Thesystem also includes a KnowledgeStore (KS) for sources andprocessing outcomes. The KS isinstalled on Hadoop and Hbase andincludes a triple store. For storingthe Terabytes of results, we usespecific storage units at SURFSara.

Our group is alsoheavily involved in making

research results available in such away that they can be replicated andreproduced by others. To this end,we use version-control systems

such as Github, websites withreleases, documentation ofmodules, processes and dataformats, descriptions ofexperiments and tutorials. We tryto standardise the systems and theformats against widely usedpractices, while at the samedeveloping our own standards fornew types of information.

Eventually, we hope to demon-strate that we can handle the

news streams in differentlanguages and provide a properscientific platform both fordeveloping natural languageprocessing modules and forcreating data structures for

researchers to explore newsstreams as datasets. The latter willshed light on how many changes inthe world are actually reported,how much duplication there isacross sources, how much theyagree or disagree about theinformation provided, whatopinions and perspectives areprovided. Our data structuresshould provide valuableinformation and knowledge aboutthe history of the changing worldas provided by a wide range ofmedia sources. In the future, wewill expand this range beyondwritten sources to include variousmultimedia sources, among themstructured databases, sensors,audio-visual data, and images.

Piek Vossenphoto Riechelle van der Valk

175 years of processing - every dayIt will take our standarduniversity server (2 Quad

cores, 8 GB RAM, Linux) 175years to process the daily batchof over 2 million news articlesstored by information brokerssuch as Lexis Nedis. Myresearch group at the Faculty ofArts of VU UniversityAmsterdam is building systemsfor ‘deep reading’ of natural-language text to relate today’snews to news processed in thepast. What happened where andwhen, and who was involved?But also: who is the source, whatis the opinion expressed, is it afactual statement, a denial orspeculation? Ideally, our cascadeof more than 15 natural-languageprocessing modules should beable to process this batch beforethe next day’s batch arrives.

MIMORE A microcompara-tive morphosyntacticresearch toolThe MIMORE tool enables resear-chers to investigate morphosyntacticvariation in Dutch dialects bysearching three related databases(DynaSAND, DiDDD and GTRP) usinga common online search engine. Thesearch results can be visualised ongeographic maps and exported forstatistical analysis.With the MIMORE search enginethese three databases can besearched simultaneously, using textstrings, part of speech tags andsyntactic variables. The researcherscan combine categories and featuresinto complex tags or use predefinedtags. All categories and features arebased on the ISOCAT standards.Since all sentences have a locationcode, the morphosyntactic pheno-mena found in a set of sentencesresulting from a search can beautomatically plotted on a geographicmap. It is possible to include morethan one morphosyntacticphenomenon in one map, thusvisualising potential correlationsbetween these phenomena. Alsoincluded is a user-friendly exportfunction for external data use, e.g. ina statistical application. Sjef Barbiers

PilNar Pilgrim narrativesChurches are being closed andreligion is moving to the margin.Paradoxically, we see religion andritual flourishing and emerging inEurope. One example that stands outhere is pilgrimage: the pilgrimage toSantiago de Compostela in particularhas become unprecedentedly popular.Pilgrimage narratives, especiallytravel accounts, have been used as afavourite source for research into

ritual and religious dynamics for along time. In the PilNar project acorpus of modern pilgrimagenarratives is constructed. It consistsof Dutch texts written after ca. 2000that present the thoughts andimpressions of pilgrims to Santiagode Compostela.The pilgrimage to Santiago is used asan example of current ritual andreligious dynamics. This source hashardly, if ever, been used forcontemporary research in the culturalsciences. Previous exploratoryresearch has made it clear that thecorpus of stories intended here is anexcellent source for research into theprofile (or, better, profiles) of themodern pilgrim. Paul Post

D-Lucea Database of thelongitudinal utrechtcollection of english accentsAt University College Utrecht (UCU),students and staff speak a widevariety of native languages, but theyall use English as the lingua franca oncampus. How will the English accentevolve over time, the accent ofEnglish native speakers and of nativespeakers of other languages (Dutch,Italian, Spanish, etc.)?To answer this question an existingdatabase of speech recordings of L1and L2 speakers of English is beingcurated. The recorded speakers arestudents from the UCU community.These students are being recordedlongitudinally throughout their 3-yearperiod on campus, using read andspontaneous speech in their L1 andin L2 English (or in L1 English only).The resulting database is of interestfor research and development inlinguistics, language education,speech technology, andsociophonetics. Hugo Quené

Jan Odijk, Programme Director, and Arjan van Hessen, member Exe-cutive Board: “The infrastructure is tailored to the average humanitiesscholar” photo Inge Angevaare

E-DATA & RESEARCH SPECIAL ISSUE 2014 3

The Dutch projects CLARIN-NL

and DARIAH-NL have merged and

evolved into a new infrastructure

for data and tools in the huma-

nities: CLARIAH. Patricia Alkhoven

Libraries, museums and archives conserve andmanage large collections of data (texts, images,structured data, audio-visual materials) whichare gradually being made available in digitalform for re-use. Until now there has not been anintegrated approach to dealing with digital dataand tools for the humanities; existing datasetsare not interconnected, and researchers andstudents experience a lack of training inapplying digital methods to analyse largedatasets. CLARIAH aims to deal with theseissues and find integrating solutions.The CLARIAH infrastructure will giveresearchers access to large collections of digitaldata and innovative, user-friendly applicationsfor the processing of these data. Both data andtools will be managed in a sustainable way, i.e.they will be easily accessible to humanityscholars such as linguists, historians and mediascientists.CLARIAH is the natural continuation andextension of two national projects: CLARIN-NL(linguistics, texts) and DARIAH-NL (socio-economic history, structured data),complemented with a third pillar: Media Studies(audio-visual data). CLARIAH combines theEuropean CLARIN and DARIAH infrastructuresin the Netherlands.

Beyond topic and timeUntil recently, addressing questions aboutculture and identity depended on experts’ abilityto identify potentially relevant pieces ofinformation in archives, libraries and museums.

Because such research was extremely timeconsuming, it was hardly possible to look at allthe data or test alternative analyses.In the CLARIAH infrastructure digital data willbe made accessible to a large number ofresearchers, who will be able to process themusing digital tools. They will be well equippedto verify data selections and other researchers’interpretations. CLARIAH will open up theirworld by enabling them to search beyond theboundaries of topic and time, to tackle the vastuniverse of data and study the development ofculture, cultural identities and ideas.On 1 October 2013, the CLARIAH proposal for a

‘National Roadmap for Large-Scale ResearchFacilities’ was submitted to the NetherlandsOrganisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Adecision about the project proposal is expectedby June 2014.If funding is awarded, the project will belaunched on 1 January 2015. The five demoprojects described here show the current andfuture possibilities of CLARIAH.clariah.nl

CLIO-DAPThe purpose of CLIO-DAP is to improvecommunication in research by askingleading scientific journals in the field ofeconomic and social history to makeavailable the research data associatedwith articles they publish. The softwareshould facilitate the process where dataare deposited in reliable digital dataarchives; ideally, these data collections arealso published and reviewed, andsubsequently linked to the correspondingpublications.CLIO-DAP has built a demonstratorservice for CLARIAH with enhancedpublications to showcase existing outputfrom socio-economic history journals witha Data Availability Policy (DAP) and toillustrate the workflows needed. It thuscontributes to convincing stakeholders inother journals to adopt similar policies.cliodap.dans.knaw.nlLeen Breurs

OHT Oral History TodayOral History collections are a rich basis forvarious types of scholarly research. However,scholars need tools to explore thesecollections in a way that is suitable foranswering research questions. In the firstphase of research, scholars need to selectrelevant collections. After that, they will wantto analyse the selected materials thoroughly.The tool developed in OHT aids the scholarduring the selection phase by means ofkeyword search, content visualisation usingword clouds, and various filter options basedon information available in the metadata, suchas time periods and location. For the analysisphase, the OHT tool provides features like apersonal folder to store interesting segmentsselected using a virtual cutter. The segmentscan be annotated and shared withcolleagues. The tool also recommendsrelated interviews or interview segments inthe collection. oht.staging.dispectu.com/#Roeland Ordelman

TROVe TransmediaObservaoryDifferent kinds of media, suchas newspapers, TVbroadcasts, blogs and otheronline social media, are gettingmore and more entangled. Ittherefore makes sense to useall news sources available ifone is interested in studyingthe diffusion of news itemsacross media channels andover time. TROVe has built asearch engine that allowsscholars from the humanities toanalyse multi-media contentover time. Specific roles of thevarious media, theirinterrelationships and theirmutual influences can beexamined in one interface.TROVe not only allows theidentification of key players,but also analyses the roles theyplay in discursiveconstructions. Eventually it willbe able to show how thevarious media and actors(people, organisations)interact, in other words: howthey influence public debate.clariah.nl/en/trove/summaryJohan Oomen

NederlabNederlab’s goal is to enable scholars inthe humanities to find answers to new,longitudinal research questions. For thispurpose Nederlab aims at setting up auser-friendly tool-enriched web interface,allowing researchers to simultaneouslysearch, analyse, and enrich the digitalhistorical texts made available by scientificlibraries and institutes, at the text andmetadata levels. The CLARIAH demon-strator is a working Nederlab prototype.It consists of a website offering a VirtualResearch Environment for diachronicresearch, with a transparent and efficientuser interface that is designed to meet thespecific needs of end users. In thisrespect, Nederlab differs from existinguser interfaces such as those currentlyoffered by CLARIN, which mainly focus onthe supply of tools and data.www.nederlab.nlNicoline van der Sijs

policies are geared towards aknowledge-based society. I am alsovery pleased with the policy oneScience and the creation of aneScience centre that serves a numberof application areas. Finally, dataarchiving at DANS is an importantservice focusing on the socialsciences and humanities in particular,which are areas with a strong

potential and acute needs for futuredata storage.”The natural sciences, social sciencesand humanities have developedmany different research infrastruc-tures in the course of time. Willthey all stand the test of time?“There are many challenges ahead.The best research infrastructuressupport researcher collaboration invirtual research communities where

knowledge sharing between the bestbrains is combined with openaccess to research results and state-of-the-art computing systems toincrease the efficiency and creati-vity of research in Europe. Thisrequires a strong focus on e-infra-structure (i.e. digital infrastructuressuch as data and computing systems,communication networks andvirtual research environments) toensure solutions for global high-speed networking, access to researchdata and instruments wherever they

are, sufficient computing capabili-ties and software that responds to theneeds of tomorrow’s researchers.”Kroes sees opportunities for theSSH when big data tools andresearch methods are put toefficient use. “Open research datacould help combine and shareworks of different research groups,thereby creating new collaborationsand tackling new issues for solvingcommon challenges. Furthermore,social sciences and humanities havean enormous new research potential

in the form of data created andemerging from online socialnetworks and social mediaactivities. It would therefore bevery important to include the topicsof curation methods and datacollection & analysis in SSHcurricula, so as to help futureresearchers and scholars benefitfrom such new resources. I wouldadvise promoting and supportingthe inclusion of both topics; thiscould lead the way to newmultidisciplinary approaches.”

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Kroes: ‘Challenges ahead’

An integrated approach for data and tools in the humanities

Searching beyond theborders of topic and time

Baroque Library Prague photo Bango

HLZ (HSN Links Zeeland)Microdata on ‘changes in life courses’provide a unique insight in how societieschange over time. The Historical Sampleof the Netherlands (HSN) collects thiskind of data for the Netherlands and islargely based on municipal registers.However, some registers are incomplete,do not provide information on stillbirthsand sometimes provide conflictinginformation. LINKS (Linking System forHistorical Family Reconstruction) isbased on civil certificates and aims atthe reconstruction of all nineteenth andearly twentieth century families in theNetherlands.HLZ demonstrates the value ofcombining differently structured datasetsby extending and enhancing the HSNdatabase with data from the LINKSdatabase for the province of Zeeland.iisg.nl/hsn/index.htmlKees Mandemakers

A wider use of data leads toan improved understandingof societal problems.

Whether they are researching, say,family changes in modern society,social effects of primary schoolsor attitudes towards data, socialscientists want to use and comparedata from as many differentEuropean countries as possible.CESSDA could play an importantrole in acquiring these data.

Cross-border accessThe main goals of CESSDA are tofacilitate and promote the wideruse of data in social, economic andpolitical research and, by doing so,improve our understanding ofongoing societal problems as wellas available solutions. CESSDAaims to achieve these objectivesthrough the development andcoordination of standards,protocols and professional bestpractices in data management andtechnical infrastructure. CESSDAwill provide relevant trainingprogrammes, which are alsoexplicitly aimed at countries

where national infrastructures stillhave to be set up from scratch.One of CESSDA’s key objectives isto facilitate access to dataresources regardless of thelocation of either the researcher orthe data, in Europe or elsewhere. Areal challenge for internationalresearch today is cross-borderaccess to these resources. CESSDAintends to break down the barrierscreated by specific nationalrequirements. The EU-funded Datawithout Boundaries project, inwhich CESSDA is involved, hasalready started work on this.CESSDA has a solid base as itcontains the oldest digital archivesof Europe. It was founded in 1976as the Council of European SocialScience Data Archives. As aEuropean Research InfrastructureConsortium (ERIC), CESSDA hasnow become a permanent legalpan-European research infra-structure in 2013. Heiko Tjalsmacessda.net

4 SPECIAL ISSUE 2014 E-DATA & RESEARCH

The ESS studies a broad range ofattitudes and behaviours in achanging Europe in a two-yearlysequence. Topics addressed in themain questionnaire of the ESS varyfrom moral opinions, health issues,trust and social capital to all kindsof aspects of a person’s socio-economic position and householdcircumstances. Other topics changefrom round to round, enabling theESS to cover a wide thematic rangeand adapt to changing demands.The ESS is widely used byacademics, researchers, politicians,policymakers and journalistsinterested in patterns in publicopinions and behaviours whichvary over time and across

countries.The ESS data, collected in morethan 30 countries in six roundssince 2002, thus may be used toshed light on issues of compara-bility and/or differentiation. Forinstance, significant differences inpolitical engagement and socialattitudes persist between Easternand Western Europe, underpinnedby differences in history, culture,institutional and legal conditions.There is also evidence of agrowing economic and politicaldivide between Northern andSouthern Europe, fuelled bydifferent experiences with theEurozone crisis.Over the past decade, the ESS has

become an authoritative source ofreliable data about Europe’sevolving social, political and moralcondition with high standards ofrigour in cross-national researchwith respect to sampling, datacollection, reduction of bias, andreliability of questions.europeansocialsurvey.org

This article is based on the ESSreport ‘Exploring public attitudes,informing public policy. Selectedfindings from the first five rounds’,2013.

Great opportunities for comparativeresearch: the European Social Survey

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Secondly, the strongmethodological basis of theEuropean Social Survey ensurescross-national comparability ofthe data, an issue that makes theESS the most important survey ofits kind. Thirdly, the EuropeanSocial Survey provides importantinformation on the respondents’socio-economic characteristics:indispensable information forscholars aiming to understandsocial phenomena in their nationalcontext.

The main conclusion of ourstudy is that the number of

hours worked is neitherexclusively determined bywomen’s personal workpreferences nor exclusivelydetermined by a country’s culture

of gender egalitarianism. It is theinterplay of personal preferencesand prevailing cultural values thatseems to matter: the individualpreferences appear to matter mostin the European countries, wherethe populations at large sharemore gender-egalitarian attitudes.The European goal of increasingwomen’s labour-marketparticipation thus cannot beachieved by just ‘activatingwomen’. Indeed, the population atlarge should also embrace valuesof gender equality – a challengefor the policy-makers of the 21stcentury. Our dive into theEuropean Social Survey proved tobe rewarding.

Andringa, W., Nieuwenhuis, R.and Gerven, M. van (to appear).Women’s employment: Theinterplay between individual workpreferences and countryliberalism in 24 Europeancountries.

Minna van Gervenphoto Charles Kuiper

Personal preferences matter, if culture allows

W hy do some women workfull-time, when others

work only part-time and somenot at all? The number of hoursthat women work is affected bytheir personal preferences on theone hand, and by national cultureon the other. In a recent studyconducted with colleagues at theUniversity of Twente, we haveanalysed this interplay betweenindividual work preferences andsocial conditions. We focused onthe extent of gender egalitaria-nism in 24 European countries.The European Social Survey(round 2, 2004) provided suitabledata for testing existing theoriesabout the influence of workpreferences on women’sdecisions concerning work andfamily. Using the EuropeanSocial Survey turned out to be aprudent choice. First of all, round2 of the European Social Surveycomprises a dedicated set ofquestions on family, work andwellbeing. With these questionswe could measure not onlyindividual work preferences, butalso the extent of genderegalitarianism in the countries.

Women in full-time paid work are responsible, on average, for aroundtwo-thirds of the total time heterosexual couples spend on houseworkphoto Everett Collection

Despite ever closer European integration, EU countries showpersistent and remarkable differences in a variety of fields.The European Social Survey (ESS) covers a wide range oftopics that tap into key challenges facing Europe today.Gerbert Kraaykamp and Kees Aarts

Removing barriersto facilitate cross-border research

The social sciences are

becoming increasingly multi-

disciplinary as new techno-

logy opens up vast new

opportunities for measuring

and linking data from very

different fields. SHARE-MESS

will position Dutch social

scientists at the forefront of

their field and form the hub

of an international network

of advanced data-collection

efforts. Marcel Das

Technology is changing society itself,particularly the way we communicateand interact. Simultaneously, Westernsocieties are ageing fast, with manyinherent economic, social and medicalchallenges. The Roadmap projectsSHARE and MESS make it possible tostudy such significant changes in societyusing state-of the-art methods.Both SHARE and MESS provide a large-scale social science facility, each of adifferent kind. SHARE collects similardata in 20 countries. Researchers can usethem to study the impact of differentinstitutions, policies and policy reformson health, employment, and wellbeing indifferent countries. In MESS, researchersfrom around the world can conduct theirown experiments using the LISS panel orimmigrant panel and test newmeasurement devices. The twoapproaches are now combined in a newlarge-scale social science facility:SHARE-MESS.

Attractive and cost efficientThe merged facility will build on theresults that these two facilities haveachieved separately and capitalise on thesynergies between them to create a set ofstate-of-the-art resources for cutting-edgemulti-disciplinary work in the socialsciences. The SHARE-MESS team will:• collect longitudinal data forsubstantive research in the socialsciences;

• develop, test, and deploy technologicalinnovations in survey tools andmeasurement techniques;

• conduct experiments;• incorporate multi-mode interviewinginto the SHARE-MESS facility;

• link survey data to various forms ofadministrative data;

• increase linkages with other populationsurveys.

The first mission of SHARE-MESS is todevelop an infrastructure that exploitsnew technology, is attractive and costefficient for collecting survey data ingeneral, and will accommodatenumerous major data-collection effortsin the future. Here, the framework isessentially survey methodology. Asecond mission of SHARE-MESS will beto collect rich longitudinal andexperimental data so that researchersmay better understand individual andhousehold decision-making, and howdecisions and circumstances affect manyaspects of life.

E-DATA & RESEARCH SPECIAL ISSUE 2014 5

MESS uses innovative ways of data collection, for instance accelerometers to objectively measurephysical activity photo Dirima

SHARE and MESS join forces in social science facility

Data collectionto a new level

SHARE An indispensable tool forresearch on ageing issues

SHARE is part of a global scientific effortinvolving researchers from around the worldworking in various disciplines. The synchro-nised cross-national SHARE data have led to newinsights into how public policy affects issues likehealth, poverty and social exclusion among theolder part of the population.

The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement inEurope (SHARE) is a large-scale, longitudinalsurvey of socio-economic status and health amongpeople over 50 years of age in 20 countries,including the Netherlands. The survey covers keyareas of life, including household demographics,physical and mental health, health behaviour, socio-economic status, and family and social networks.The survey data include data from physical testswhich the respondents complete during theinterviews, such as grip strength and lung force.

Recently, the first experiments to collect dried bloodspots using a finger prick have started to facilitatemore precise disease risk assessment.SHARE provides an indispensable tool for researchon ageing-related issues. It aims at increasingknowledge on the sustainability of pension systems,the labour market for older workers, preparation forretirement and savings behaviour, mental andphysical health in relation to socio-economic status,and healthcare use. Today, SHARE is part of aconsortium of harmo-nised ageing studies in manycountries, including the US, Mexico, Japan, China,South Korea and India. This makes SHARE part ofa global scientific effort involving researchers fromaround the world working in diverse disciplines. InMarch 2011, the EU selected SHARE as the firstever European Research Infrastructure Consortium(ERIC), with a legal status that gives it theadvantages of a majorinternational organisation.share-project.nlMarcel Das

Innovativeforms of datacollectionMESS facilitates a wide rangeof experimental approaches tolink social sciences to lifesciences.

AccelerometersSelf-reports on physical activitiesare usually limited to certain aspectsof daily activity such as structuredexercise or walking. Daily activitiesand sedentary behaviour are usuallymissing. In addition, responses toquestionnaires may not be accuratebecause of the cognitive challengeof estimating frequency andduration of activities, and socialdesirability bias. The developmentof accelerometers has opened upnew possibilities for studying allintensity levels of physical activity,from completely sedentary tovigorous activity, over periods ofseveral days.

Bathroom scalesAdvanced bathroom scales are usedto objectively measure the weightsand fat percentages of LISS panelrespondents. The scales have awireless internet connection, whichimmediately transmits all measure-ments to the database without theneed for respondents to reportanything. The accurate and steadyflow of measurements allows themonitoring of fluctuations in weightand fat percentage over time and inaddition provides a unique insightin the reliability of self-reportedmeasures.

SmartphonesSmartphones make it easy to keep adiary of activities multiple times aday simply because people tend tocarry their smartphone with them allday. Another advantage of usingsmartphones for time use datacollection is that it enables thecollection of additional informationon the respondents’ reportingbehaviour. These so-called ‘para-data’ include, for example, time ofreporting, correction of activities, orthe effect of sending reminders torespondents. The time use diary isalso combined with GPS registra-tions of the locations where thereported activities took place, andquestions about the mood oremotions of the respondent duringthe day.Mobile devices allow researchers togain insight into the movements ofrespondents throughout their dailyroutines. A mobile application isused in the LISS panel to automati-cally detect detailed trip informationof a group of respondents bymaking use of different locationmeasures, such as GPS, cell towertriangulation and WiFi geo-location.The collected information includesthe starting and end points, modesof transportation and in some caseseven the purpose of the trip.

MESS Boosting research in the socialsciences and related disciplines

Progress in the social sciences relies on high-quality data. MESS provides researchers with anactive laboratory and forefront environment forcollecting data and conducting innovativeexperiments. The facility is open to the globalscientific community, free of charge.

The Advanced Multidisciplinary Facility forMeasurement and Experimentation in the SocialSciences (MESS) is a large-scale researchinfrastructure open to academic researchersworldwide. The project is designed to stimulate andintegrate research in the social sciences, lifesciences and behavioural sciences. MESS is runby CentERdata (Tilburg University). MESS, a Dutchinitiative, is embedded in an international researchnetwork that includes the American Life Panel,a similar facility in the US, and comparableenterprises in France and Germany.The central resource in the facility is the

Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social sciences(LISS) panel. This panel of about 5,000 householdsis representative of the Dutch-speaking populationin the Netherlands aged 16 and over. The recruit-ment of households is based on a probabilitysample drawn by Statistics Netherlands from muni-cipal registers. Each month, panel members answerquestions online for approximately 30 minutes.Another element of the MESS project is theadditional special immigrant panel. The immigrantpanel is comprised of approximately 2,400individuals, 1,700 of which are of non-Dutch origin.The sample was also drawn by StatisticsNetherlands from the municipal registers, stratifiedby country of origin.Researchers can propose new modules, free ofcharge, ranging from a few questions to longerquestionnaires or tailored experiments.All data collected in MESS arepublished online and are freelyavailable to academic researchers.lissdata.nlMarcel Das

6 SPECIAL ISSUE 2014 E-DATA & RESEARCH

DARIAH, the Digital ResearchInfrastructure for the Artsand Humanities, is committedto advancing the digitalrevolution in the arts andhumanities across Europeby connecting resources andtools with the emerging nextgeneration of digital scholars.Laurent Romary and SallyChambers

As more sources become digital,more digital content is beingproduced and more digital tools arebeing deployed, we see a nextgeneration of digital scholars in thehumanities emerge. DARIAH aimsto connect these resources, tools andscholars, ensuring that the state ofthe art in research is sustained andintegrated across Europeancountries.

CollaborationsDARIAH works closely withresearch communities in anexpanding network of affiliatedprojects, for example with archaeo-logists (via ARIADNE, the Advan-ced Research Infrastructure forArchaeological Data Networking inEurope), medieval and modernhistorians (via CENDARI, theCollaborative European DigitalArchive Infrastructure) and Holo-caust researchers (via EHRI, theEuropean Holocaust ResearchInfrastructure). This collaborationfosters the production of digitalreference materials of all kinds(archival descriptions, transcrip-tions, annotated images, musicalsimulations, 3D models, etc.) andmakes it essential to offer a dataplatform combining generic andspecific hosting facilities.Although some digital humanitiesprojects such the TEI (TextEncoding Initiative) have alreadyachieved high levels of maturity andreach, many new projects arefunded where scholars need tocollaborate and require help andsupport. It is important to rememberthat the wide majority of scholarshas little or no background in digitalmethods. The vision for DARIAH istherefore to offer a portfolio ofinfrastructure-orientated activitiescentred around research communi-ties across the broad spectrum of thearts and humanities, no matter howfar advanced they are in the digitalrevolution.dariah.eu

ARIADNE Excavating thepast, building the future

There is a large availability ofarchaeological digital datasetsspanning many periods, domainsand regions. However, due toaccess barriers and non-homogenous perspectives, theirpotential has been constrained.ARIADNE brings together andintegrates existingarchaeological research datainfrastructures to allowresearchers to use the variousdistributed datasets as well asnew and powerful technologiesin archaeological research.ARIADNE aims to enableresearchers to access datacentres, tools and guidance fromvarious countries; intends tocreate new web-based servicesbased on common interfaces todata repositories; and willpromote the availability ofreference datasets and the useof innovative technologies.ARIADNE is set to contribute tothe creation of a new communityof researchers ready to exploitthe contribution of InformationTechnology and to incorporate itin the body of establishedarchaeological researchmethodology.ariadne-infrastructure.euMarieke Polhout and ValentijnGilissen

NEDIMAH Networkfor Digital Methods inthe Humanities

NeDiMAH is one of the so-calledResearch NetworkingProgrammes of the EuropeanScience Foundation (ESF).Sixteen European countriesparticipate in the initiative, whichis scheduled to run for four yearsuntil May 2015.NeDiMAH is responsible for aseries of activities andnetworking events that will allowthe examination of the practiceof, and evidence for, digitalresearch in the arts andhumanities across Europe. It ispromoting collaboration andnetworking among thecommunity of European scholarsin this field as well as thoseengaged in creating and curatingdigital collections of scientificand cultural heritage.Five working groups have beenset up in which scholars canexchange and share insights andresults. NeDiMAH will enable artsand humanities researchers todevelop, refine and shareresearch methods that allowthem to create and deploy digitalmethods, collections andinfrastructures. NeDiMAH

collaborates closely with theDARIAH and CLARIN e-researchinfrastructure projects and othernational and internationalinitiatives. All NeDiMAH activitiesare open to the entire Europeancommunity of scholars.nedimah.euRené van Horik

CARARE Bringingcontent for archaeologyand historic buildingsto Europeana users

CARARE is a Best PracticeNetwork, funded under theEuropean Commission’s ICT

Policy Support Programme. It isdesigned to involve and supportEurope’s network of heritageagencies and organisations,archaeological museums,research institutes and specialistdigital archives in the followingactivities:• opening up – through thecultural network of Europeana –the digital content onarchaeological and architecturalheritage which they hold;• aggregating content anddelivering services; and• enabling access to 3D andVirtual Reality content throughEuropeana.CARARE is one of a suite ofprojects aimed at furtherdeveloping the Europeanacultural network. It will play animportant role in involvingEurope’s network of organisa-tions responsible for investi-gating, protecting and promotingunique archaeological monu-ments, architecturally importantbuildings, historic town centresand industrial monuments ofWorld, European and nationalheritage importance alongsidethe existing national, regionaland local content providers.carare.eu/engMarieke Polhout and ValentijnGilissen

EHRI Digital infrastruc-ture as well as humannetwork

The European HolocaustResearch Infrastructure (EHRI)aims to support the Holocaustresearch community byproviding –online – access todispersed sources relating to theHolocaust and by encouragingcollaborative research. EHRI

helps researchers overcome oneof the major challenges facingHolocaust research: the fact thatthe research materials aredispersed across Europe.Beyond this unique attempt tobring information aboutcollections together, EHRI

activities range from promotingnew research methodologies toconducting analyses of researchneeds, e-Science standards andtechnologies, and researchsupport. EHRI’s fellowshipprogramme enables researchersto work on-site in a number ofleading institutes. EHRI

organises summer courses onHolocaust research andpromotes a European-wideapproach.An important condition for EHRI

to succeed is its interdisciplinarystructure. The collaborationbetween historians, archivistsand e-infrastructure specialists isa key contributing factor toEHRI’s success.ehri-project.euPetra Drenth

DARIAH connects Europe’s resources, tools and scholars

Advancing a digital revolutionin the arts and humanities

Watercolour showing perspective of main elevation of Craigends House by David Bryce credits RCAHMS

Family relationships have

changed a lot over the past

few decades. The Generations

and Gender Programme (GGP)

is intended to answer the

questions that come with

these changes.

Tom Emery and Anne Gauthier

Today’s families differ considerably fromthose of the 1950s, where the malebreadwinner and his housewife were thenorm. Families have become less stable,more complex and highly diversified. Therapid ageing of European populations hasalso contributed to this fast change, whilenew types of families have emergedalongside new relationships betweengenerations and genders. Understandingthese changes will help us meet many of thechallenges that societies face today, such as:How do we support and care for the elderly?How is disadvantage inherited? Why arewomen having fewer children?The GGP was launched in 2001 and nowcovers 19 advanced industrialized countries.It improves our understanding of howvarious factors affect family life bycollecting high quality individual-levelsurvey data on topics such as partnershipformation & dissolution, fertility andintergenerational solidarity. Respondents areinterviewed every 3 years and changes intheir family life are recorded. Importantly,the GGP covers the entire lifespan ofadulthood between the ages of 18 and 79and is the only dataset dedicated to thelongitudinal and cross-national study offamily life and generational relationshipsfrom early adulthood to old age. Over time,the GGP follows respondents throughrelationships, marriages, parenthood,divorces, deaths of loved ones and many ofthe trials and tribulations that people meetwith, tracking the impact and consequencesof these life events at the individual and thesocietal level. These survey data arecomplemented with regional and nationalindicators through a contextual databasewhich helps us understand the part thatpolicy and other contextual factors play infamily life.The Netherlands is a front-runner in thisresearch area. Not only has it been involvedin the GGP since its inception, it has alsohosted the project since 2009. Last year hasbeen a particularly busy year for the GGP inthe Netherlands as it saw the collection ofWave 4 of the Dutch GGP involving a newcollaboration with CBS (StatisticsNetherlands). Using the Wave 4 dataset,researchers can now look back over aturbulent decade and see its impact uponDutch family life as well as look forward tomonitoring the impact and implications ofthis change in future waves of the GGP.

Building a nest during afinancial crisisRecent evidence from the GGP shows thatstarting a family is strongly intertwined withhousing quality and home-ownership.Typically, couples will only start a family ifthey can live together and they will onlystart to live together if there is good andaffordable housing available. But after manydecades of increasing average housingquality and levels of home-ownership in

Europe things have turned around recentlywith the housing-market crisis in connectionwith the global financial crisis. It can nowbe very difficult for young couples to get amortgage and start climbing the housingladder. Given this, future research aims tounderstand housing-market fluctuations,including the recent crisis, as well as thespatial differentiations in housingopportunities and their interplay withhousehold formation and child-bearing. Forexample, do couples delay having childrenbecause they can’t afford to buy a home?Such questions are currently underinvestigation using GGP data.

Who has kids outside ofmarriage?Recent analysis of GGP data supports thelong held belief that having a first childoutside marriage is more prevalent amongthose with lower levels of education. But italso reveals that in some countries, such asFrance, this is no longer true and it is in fact

those with higher education who are morelikely to have a child outside of marriage.Whether or not this pattern will spread toother countries, and whether or not it isinfluenced by the legal and institutionalenvironment of families are key questionsthat researchers are looking to answer withthe GGP. In answering questions like thiswe can start to understand what marriageand parenthood mean in the 21st century.Why do we get married? Why do we havekids? And what have the two got to do witheach other?

Care and support acrossgenerationsThe GGP has led to several key findingsabout the way generations support eachother throughout life. For example, the GGPwas used to show how loneliness is moreprevalent in Eastern Europe than in WesternEurope. This is attributable to the greaterhealth and wealth of older generations inWestern Europe and the extent to which this

helps them combat loneliness. But the GGPhas also revealed that older generations arenot merely vulnerable but also play animportant support role for youngergenerations. GGP data were used to showthat in some countries, such as Hungary,grandparents helping out with childcare areimportant for young women who want toreturn to work after having a child. Yet inother countries, like the Netherlands, theavailability of grandparents for childcaredoes not affect a mother’s decision to work.Future research is set to examine whetherthis is because of culture, policy or someother factors. These are just two of the waysin which the GGP has demonstrated thecomplexity and diversity of relationshipsbetween generations as well as the need toconsider this diversity indifferent countries.ggp-i.org

E-DATA & RESEARCH SPECIAL ISSUE 2014 7

GGP follows respondents through trials and tribulations

Understanding societythrough our relationships

GGP Topics• Fertility• Partnership• Transition to adulthood• Work-family balance• Gender relations• Intergenerational exchanges• Informal and formal care• Wellbeing and health• Grandparenthood• Economic activity• Retirement

Loneliness on the De JongGierveld Short Scaleacross 7 Countries. (DeJong Gierveld, J., & VanTilburg, T. (2010). The DeJong Gierveld ShortScales for emotional andsocial loneliness: tested ondata from 7 countries inthe UN generations andgender surveys. EuropeanJournal of Ageing, 7(2),121-130.)

Grandparents helping out can be important for women who want to return to work after having achild photo Marcel Jancovic

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DASISHData Service Infrastructurefor the Social Science andHumanitiesDASISH is an umbrella projectcoordinating activities for all ofthe five existing European infra-structures in the social sciencesand humanities (CLARIN,DARIAH, CESSDA, ESS andSHARE). Its goals are to identifypossible synergies in infrastructuredevelopment and to work on someconcrete joint activities. Theseactivities involve improving dataquality, data archiving, dataenrichment and shared data access,as well as legal and ethical issues.Dutch project partners areCentERdata, based at TilburgUniversity, and DANS.dasish.eu------------------------------------------

EUDATEuropean Data InfrastructureThe EUDAT project has somesimilarities with DASISH, as itbrings together data serviceproviders and aims at developingcommon standards and services.EUDAT is, however, directedtowards a user community whichis active in other areas. Theresearch communities involved inEUDAT are EPOS (earth sciences),ENES (climate sciences),LIFEWATCH (environmentalsciences), INCF (neuroinformatics)and CLARIN (linguistics). Thelatter is also part of the DASISHinitiative. The EUDAT consortiumcomprises 26 European partnersfrom 13 countries. The Nether-lands is represented bySURFSARA. The development ofcommon data services is organisedby establishing common views ona number of topics. These are (1)support for real-time DynamicData, (2) Workflow Support toorchestrate data processing chains,(3) Semantics to check correctnessof incoming data against trustedontologies, and (4) Data Accessand Re-use at community andservice provider levels.eudat.eu------------------------------------------

APARSENAlliance for PermanentAccess to the Records ofScience NetworkThe aim of the APARSEN projectis to establish a Virtual Centre ofExcellence (VCoE) on digitalpreservation. The 31 projectpartners, operating in the culturalheritage sector, the research datacommunity and the corporateworld, share their expertise in thefield of digital preservation onfour topics: ‘trust’, ‘sustaina-bility’, ‘accessibility’ and‘usability’. The outreach activities,such as consultancy, training andtools, will form the basis of theVCoE. The Dutch partners in theAPARSEN project are Data

8 SPECIAL ISSUE 2014 E-DATA & RESEARCH

Collaborations are the best way to initiate, improve and extend research infrastructures picture Alphaspirit

Archiving and Networked Services(DANS) and the National Library ofthe Netherlands (KB).aparsen.eu------------------------------------------

Europeana CloudEuropeana Cloud is a best practicenetwork related to the Europeanaservice, which provides access tomillions of European culturalheritage objects. The aim of theproject is to establish a cloud-basedsolution for the Europeana systemand its aggregators. EuropeanaCloud will provide new content,new metadata, a new linked storagesystem, new tools and services forresearchers and a new platform:Europeana Research. The‘Researcher Needs’ work packageis dedicated to the identificationand assessment of the needs ofresearchers in the social sciencesand humanities. Among theactivities carried out within the

framework of this work package isthe execution of a web survey tocollect information on digitalresearch practices, tools andcontent, focusing on the potentialuse of content from Europeana. Theproject has 35 partners of which sixare Dutch or Netherlands-based.pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-cloud------------------------------------------

OpenAIREplusThis project deals with promotingan Open Access infrastructure forresearch in all scientific disciplinesin Europe. Providing Open Accessto research – both research papersand underlying datasets – not onlybenefits the general public, it is alsogood for researchers: severalstudies indicate that opennessincreases citations. Openness alsoimproves reproducibility ofresearch results – and it mightintroduce new and perhaps

unexpected audiences to existingwork. The project, with 33participating partners, implements,supports and monitors the EuropeanCommission’s Open Access pilot.Guidelines for the registration andvalidation of repositories contai-ning Open Access publications arebeing compiled by the project.www.openaire.eu------------------------------------------

4CCollaboration to Clarify theCost of CurationThe 4C project is a ‘Coordinationand Support Action’ supported bythe EU. It focuses on a specificaspect of digital curation andpreservation, namely cost andbenefit issues related to it. Theresulting project will helporganisations across Europe toinvest more effectively in digitalcuration and preservation activitiesby helping them understand theaccruing costs and benefits. Apartfrom project management, theproject includes four workpackages comprising expert groupscollaborating on specific tasks andquestions. ‘Engagement’ deals withcommunication with a wide rangeof stakeholders. ‘Assessment’concerns the evaluation of existingmethods to estimate and comparethe cost of digital curation. The‘Enhance-ment’ work package is

based on a model that contains allrelevant economic determinants ofdigital preservation; it will befurther developed and refinedduring the project. A ‘Roadmap’work package will arrive atcoherent and evidence basedrecommendations for furtheractions. 4C has 13 partners (amongthem DANS) in 7 countries.4cproject.eu------------------------------------------

RDAResearch Data AllianceA truly global initiative in the fieldof research infrastructures is theResearch Data Alliance (RDA). Itwas founded by three researchfunding organisations from Europe,Australia and the United States.The RDA aims to accelerate andfacilitate research data sharing andexchange. The work of the RDA isprimarily undertaken through itsworking groups. Participation inworking groups and interest groups,starting new working groups, andattendance at the twice-yearlyplenary meetings is open to all. Theworking groups and interest groupscover a wide range of topicsrelevant to improve the quality ofresearch data infrastructures. Aspirit of cooperation and a lowthreshold for joining the groups arekey features of the RDA.rd-alliance.org

The best way to initiate, improve and extend

research infrastructures is by means of

collaboration among people and organisations.

In several projects, partners collaborate on a wide

range of subjects related to research infrastruc-

tures, such as standards, procedures and tools.

René van Horik

Common standards, procedures and tools to improve research facilities

Joining forces for the futureof research infrastructures