CLARIAH welcomes Dirk van Miert as new PI

As director of the Meertens Institute, Van den Bosch has been CLARIAH PI from September 2020 until June 2022. Under his supervision, the focus within the CLARIAH project was mainly on the development of a unified digital infrastructure for the humanities as a whole. “CLARIAH evolved from several prior projects, which led to a focus on three subdisciplines within the humanities: linguistics, media studies and socio-economic history”, Van den Bosch explains. “Our goal in CLARIAH Plus was to unite these subdisciplines and to develop common resources for the humanities altogether. I am proud we pulled this off, with the help of several interest groups.”

In his speech during the CLARIAH Quarterly last June, Van den Bosch payed special attention to the role of Jan Odijk in CLARIAH. “Jan Odijk is a giant”, he said. “Odijk may very well be seen as CLARIAH’s father, as he played a major role in all CLARIAH’s predecessors, such as CLARIN-NL and STEVIN. And in CLARIAH he is the one who initiated it all and kept thing running. We all should be so grateful to him.”

After Van den Bosch handed over the baton, the new PI glanced at the new phase CLARIAH is now entering: preparing and returning the digital infrastructure of CLARIAH and its resources to its intended end users, the humanities scholars. “Our shop must be well organized for scholars to enter. With the development of Ineo, our doors are now wide open, but we need to entice them to enter, because many are unaware of what we are selling. In fact, too many scholars have no idea what CLARIAH can do for them, so we need to go out and tell and teach them how to use all these great digital humanities resources. That’s our goal for the next 1,5 year.”