CLARIAH - Current Status

Abstract

In the Common Lab for Research in the Arts and Humanities (CLARIAH) we aim to design, construct, and exploit a facility for eHumanities research. This virtual 'Common Lab' will provide a sustainable eHumanities research environment, which will provide researchers and research groups with integrated access to unprecedented collections of seamlessly interoperating digital research resources and innovative tools to process them in virtual workspaces, thus enabling Data Intensive Science in the humanities.The Common Lab will provide researchers with a wide variety of resources and services, e.g. intelligent access methods for exploring resources and innovative ways of combining different resources into virtual collections. These services enable researchers to disclose and analyse information hidden in unstructured textual, image and multimedia resources, in combination with structured databases with qualitative and quantitative information. Interoperability of resources and services is a key element in the infrastructure. The infrastructure will be easy to access and use for scholars with a limited technical training. Through dissemination activities, educational programs and training sessions, a new generation of researchers and students will be able to acquaint themselves with new research methodologies. This will create the potential for groundbreaking research. The CLARIAH infrastructure will enable new research questions to be asked and old questions to be posed in new ways, boosting the quality, the effectiveness and the efficiency of research within the arts and humanities. The Common Lab will therefore attract top-researchers and students from abroad.

The CLARIAH consortium is of unprecedented breadth: it includes all humanities researchers in the Netherlands, the most relevant research libraries, heritage organizations, data centres and specialists in infrastructural matters, including the Netherlands eScience Center.

A wide range of public organisations and companies supports CLARIAH. It directly contributes to important policy issues in society and to the Top Sectors 'High Tech' and 'Creative Industry'. Through an outreach programme CLARIAH will involve these and other companies in the facility and create new opportunities for innovative commercial products and services. CLARIAH is the national counterpart of two European research facilities on the ESFRI Roadmap and the Dutch Roadmap 2008: CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) and DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities).

With the CLARIN and DARIAH initiatives, the character of humanities research is going to change dramatically and forever. The Netherlands is already playing an important leading role in these developments. CLARIAH will strengthen the position of the Netherlands even more, and will enable our country to take on a unique driving role in the transformation process that the arts and humanities research is currently going through.