Blog
  • 1 August 2024

Quite the run

Richard Zijdeman
Richard Zijdeman

Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Researcher, International Institute of Social History

We celebrated the end of CLARIAH-PLUS with a conference in Leiden, marking our progress in research infrastructure. With SSHOC-NL, we advance in open science. Our goal is to consolidate CLARIAH into a sustainable entity supported by universities and more cultural heritage and research institutions.

These long summer evenings allow us to reflect on things past, present and future. With the Common LAbs Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (CLARIAH) we celebrated the end of the CLARIAH-PLUS project with a fantastic conference at the ECC in Leiden. With SSHOC-NL, we are in a very good partnership with the social sciences, ODISSEI, strengthening the joint research infrastructure (RI) while exploring new frontiers in open science, including FAIR and CARE data. Finally, we will consolidate CLARIAH in a new form, an entity supported by all universities and a large number of cultural heritage and research institutes.

"The end of CLARIAH-PLUS" is what it must feel like to some. For five years we have had an incredibly intense collaboration between universities, heritage partners and research institutes, further strengthening the Dutch research infrastructure for working with textual, audio, visual and structured data. However, the nature of research infrastructure is that it requires maintenance. Like running shoes, research infrastructure needs to be dried, cleaned and occasionally relaced, at least figuratively. And so we can be grateful that, five years ago, a large number of universities and institutes were already marking today not as the end, but as the halfway point. Yes, the development of CLARIAH-PLUS is complete, but thanks to these partners we will be able to reap the fruits of CLARIAH-PLUS for at least another five years.

Meanwhile, work on the Common Lab continues with a very special partnership. In the CLARIAH-PLUS follow-up project, SSHOC-NL, social sciences and humanities are working together to strengthen common elements and learn from each other in developing new domain-specific components. Like two runners training for different goals, say a half marathon and the Seven Hills of Edinburgh, each runner has goal-specific training elements, but the runners can exchange information, train common elements and even push each other to better results. Unlike our two runners, SSHOC-NL already provides common infrastructure elements. Born out of the need to properly deal with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ODISSEI and partners have developed SANE, a secure online analysis environment. However, this environment also offers the possibility to deal with Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), which were previously mainly limited to specific source sets in CLARIAH, such as in the MediaSuite. In this way, ODISSEI and CLARIAH, while pursuing different objectives, are today catalysing the development of their respective infrastructures through the SSHOC-NL project.

And then there is the future, the things we may not have today, but wish we did. One such wish, shared by many people inside and outside the CLARIAH projects, is that CLARIAH becomes truly common, truly shared. Another common wish is to achieve sustainability beyond the project level. Projects focus on specific components, but parts of the infrastructure that are not focused on need to be maintained and developed as well. Over the past 18 months, a large number of people have been engaged in a process to create a group that will maintain the current infrastructure and help steer new projects. This group or entity, called CLARIAH, will for the first time include all the humanities faculties of Dutch universities and more heritage and research institutes than ever before in a single CLARIAH project. This is not to say that 'the future is now', for both of these desires have been long in the making and require action on more than just an organisational level. Yet by going the proverbial extra mile and establishing the CLARIAH entity in the coming months, we are one step closer to the finish line, one step closer to a common laboratory research infrastructure for all of the arts and humanities.


Wishing you beautiful summer evenings,


Richard Zijdeman

co-PI SSHOC-NL
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