UC Berkeley librarians and IT staff joined colleagues from around the world for the first DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop on September 13th at Stanford University. DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) is a humanities-oriented European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), supported by technical and staff contributions from a wide range of countries within and adjacent to Europe. At the Stanford conference, Mary Elings (Assistant Director of the Bancroft Library), Celia Emmelhainz (Anthropology & Qualitative Research Librarian), and Stacy Reardon (Digital Humanities Librarian) represented the UC Berkeley libraries, and Quinn Dombrowski represented Research IT.
Quinn gave the opening keynote, entitled “Cowboys and Consortia”, reflecting on the ways that infrastructure is built and created in the United States, in contrast to government-funded initiatives in Europe, such as DARIAH. Other presenters included Mark Algee-Hewitt from Stanford’s Literary Lab, Frank Fischer from DARIAH and the Higher School of Economics (Moscow), and Jan Brase from DARIAH and the University of Göttingen. Many of the workshop presentations highlighted resources developed by DARIAH and available for use by researchers worldwide, including the DH Course Registry; the TextGrid virtual research environment; and two resources for digital humanities pedagogy, DARIAHTeach and Parthenos.
One of the commonly-referenced challenges for the kind of research at scale that DARIAH hopes to enable was around the management and sharing of large text corpora. Research data management librarians are well-positioned to address these challenges locally, and contribute to the international conversation around standards and best practices for corpus management.
Workshop attendees started a Google group for DARIAH Beyond Europe, to continue the discussions about how best to make use of DARIAH resources. The DARIAH Beyond Europe blog will continue to serve as a forum for sharing experiences of working with DARIAH. Videos from the workshop will be posted in the near future on the DARIAH YouTube channel.
Image credit: Elaine Treharne, Twitter