This workshop, open to registered conference participants, aims to create a space where research stories intertwine with the narratives of cultural heritage organisations (CHOs) that hold cultural heritage data. Participants will share experiences, solutions, and identify needs related to infrastructural support to DH research. The workshop seeks to identify ways to improve the findability, interoperability and use of data scattered across borders, domains and media, or rare data, separated from the materials needed to interpret them.

Data in the humanities is “a digital, selectively constructed, machine-actionable abstraction representing some aspects of a given object of humanistic inquiry” (Schöch, 2013). Researchers combine heterogeneous data, from various sources. This practice is essential to develop a comprehensive view that is relevant in terms of their research questions and topics. In turn, researchers often enhance CH data by refining, classifying, and adding context, but there are few mechanisms for returning this back in circulation. Even when shared, research data often remains disconnected from original collections. The presenters in this workshop introduce a handful of research projects and practice in cultural heritage organisations that make visible the infrastructures (or the lack thereof) to access and reassemble scattered data. They will be the base for a final discussion with the aim to build a mutual vision and effective data life cycles in DH.

Venue: Building 1427 (room 246) – University of Aarhus, Fredrik Nielsens Vej 2 + 4, 8000 Aarhus C

Workshop organisers

Johanna Lilja¹, Liisa Näpärä¹, Inés Matres², Eiríkur Smári Sigurðarson³,  Mari Väina⁴

¹ National Library of Finland, ² University of Helsinki, ³ Icelandic Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts, ⁴Estonian Folklore Archives

The workshop is facilitated by researchers and organisations affiliated to DARIAH, the pan-European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. We seek to consolidate DHNB as a forum for encounters between Nordic and Baltic scholars and CHOs on issues of digitizing and using digital collections.

Contacts: Ines.Matres@helsinki.fi (researchers); Liisa.Napara@helsinki.fi (Cultural heritage organisations)