Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (CLARIAH) is a distributed research infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. The CLARIAH infrastructure will provide researchers with access to large collections of digital data and to innovative and user-friendly applications for the processing of these data. Both the data and applications will be managed in a sustainable manner so that they can also be useful in the future for researchers: from literary researchers, historians and archaeologists to linguists, speech technologists and media scientists.
The project CLARIAH-CORE (2015-2018) designs, implements and exploits the Dutch part of the European CLARIN and DARIAH infrastructures. The wishes of future users take centre stage. Workshops, summer schools and demonstrators reveal which research possibilities the available data and tools offer, thereby increasing the involvement of the intended users.
CLARIAH is on the National Roadmap for Large- Scale Research Facilities drawn up by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). After the CLARIAH-SEED project (2013-2014) the CLARIAH-CORE project was awarded M€ 12.6.
Focus Areas
CLARIAH targets three focus areas that serve as the precursor for other disciplines within the humanities. Together they represent the most important types of data: text, images, audiovisual material and structured data (databases).
The three focus areas are:
In each area, multidisciplinary teams of researchers, infrastructure specialists and data managers work on curating, enriching and linking together existing data and applications. A supporting work package is used to develop and implement the generic components relevant for all focus areas.
Although CLARIAH currently targets these three focus areas, other disciplines from the humanities and social sciences can participate as well. They can contribute their data and applications to CLARIAH and make use of the infrastructure when carrying out their research.
Sustainable storage
The data and applications will be managed and sustainably stored for the longer term at various centres in the Netherlands.
At this moment, these centres are:
| Huygens ING | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) |
| Meertens Institute (MI) | Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV) |
| DANS | National Library of the Netherlands (KB) |
| International Institute for Social History (IISH) | Institute of Dutch Language (INT) |
User involvement
An important part of CLARIAH is to enhance the " involvement" of the people working in the field of digital humanities. The involvement is stimulated via courses, workshops and demonstration days to show what is available, how it works and what scholars potentially can do with it. At the same time, CLARIAH asks humanity scholars to identify what needs they exactly have in the digital infrastructure.
Course Task Force
CLARIAH wants to embed the use of digital applications and data in the standard education curriculum. In the CLARIAH Course Task Force, Digital Humanities lecturers from all Dutch universities make agreements about the development and use and reuse of digital humanities courses. Together with other parties CLARIAH is developing courses, crash courses and workshops for students, PhDs, lecturers and other members of staff. CLARIAH also participates in summer schools and winter schools.
The Course & Project Registry provides an overview of European courses and projects in the area of digital humanities.
Partners
CLARIAH is supported by more than 40 partners: not just all Dutch humanities research institutes, but also university libraries, heritage institutions, public organisations and SME-companies.
History
CLARIAH in the Netherlands is the successor project of two earlier infrastructure projects, CLARIN-NL (2009-2015) and DARIAH-NL (2014-2020). All these projects are national contributions from the Netherlands to the European CLARIN and DARIAH infrastructures (which resp. are controlled by the CLARIN ERIC and DARIAH ERIC).
The first version of the CLARIAH-proposal was submitted in 2011 and was "just-not" granted. However, the consortium got M€ 1 “seedmoney” to improve the next proposal submission in 2013. The effort was granted in 2014 by NWO, resulting in a grant of M€ 12,6 from the "Roadmap Grootschalige Onderzoeksfaciliteiten". CLARIAH started officially in spring 2015.
Download
The final version of the granted proposal can be downloaded here.
