Cooperation and multidisciplinarity are important keywords for the IZMF. Digital Humanities bring together scientists, include relevant resources and research projects, and are in constant exchange with the responsible research institutions and initiatives on research data management and infrastructures.
With this in mind, we would like to highlight functions, cooperations and institutional networks of persons and projects participating in the DH focus.
Taking approaches drawn from cultural studies and particularly from new cultural history, the network Materiality and Virtuality is dedicated to an interdisciplinary historically and anthropologically focused understanding of the interdependencies between virtual and material realities. Materiality and virtuality do not form an irreconcilable, binary opposition; rather, in our view, it is their productive interaction that produces the texture of meanings from which “realities” are made.
We assume that people generate culture in ever new processes of negotiation in the interplay of virtuality and materiality: Be it because cultural imprints are only ideationally available and order, filter, or shape human perceptions of the physical world, or, on the other hand, these ordering performances in everyday interaction with materiality decisively shape virtually generated ideas.
We proceed from the hypothesis that the mechanisms of productive entanglement of materiality and virtuality become particularly evident in times of intensified change, which are often experienced as times of crisis. Therefore, we are interested in two periods of fundamental transformations: the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period and the changes of the late 20th and early 21st century.
The aim of our network is to conduct cross-cultural, interdisciplinary research on reciprocal interaction between materiality and virtuality and the associated fields of conflict. Our methodological goal is to develop methods and tools for working with material and immaterial sources, to generate innovations in disciplinary engagement with virtual research data, and to develop models for testing the usability of these configurations.
CLARIAH-AT is the consortium of Austrian universities and research institutions that coordinates and drives Austrian activities in the European ESFRI research infrastructures CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) and DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities).
The consortium brings together Austrian institutions with relevant expertise in research, development and teaching in the field of Digital Humanities as well as in the establishment and sustainable operation of research (data) infrastructures, which also play an active role in the Austrian development of Digital Humanities and the establishment and expansion of technical and social infrastructures for the humanities in general.
Medieval research objects are part of the cultural heritage. Preserving, developing and making them accessible in a variety of ways for further analysis is a core task of medievalists. Digital approaches and practices are constantly creating new possibilities for this, which is gradually changing the mode of research: The ‘Network Linked Open Middle Ages’ is intended to offer qualified young researchers an interdisciplinary platform to enrich relevant existing sources of digital medieval studies with innovative procedures, to evaluate these methods and to research the resources together in pilot studies.
Linked-Open-Data-Procedures (LOD) are intended to optimise the quality and depth of data access in such a way that new approaches to the research objects are opened up, which are not only sustainably developed, but whose contextualisation also contributes to a better understanding of the data. The evaluation of the applied methods and the identification of the resulting research potential form two equal pillars within the framework of the envisaged network. LOD is a pragmatically sensible option to tap and further enrich resources and thus make them visible, available and usable for very different research approaches. At the same time, LOD procedures adhere to the FAIR principles (“Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable”) and thus reflect the claim of the open network outlined here in terms of Open Science.
Digitisation turns objects into research data with a high level of evidence for a contemporary expert discourse. While LOD procedures are established for the registration of cultural assets, they have so far played hardly any role in the indexing of research data. Medieval studies, which is interdisciplinary per se, offers a suitable use case for a research-oriented adaptation of these procedures. Based on concrete resources and research contexts of the participating researchers, the network will systematically test for the first time to what extent LOD procedures can be implemented in order to improve the quality of the data and thus also the possibilities and quality of their research. The gained knowledge can be transferred to other disciplines and will be made available to the scientific community as ‘best practices’. This goes hand in hand with an exchange with various specialist communities and actors from the field of research data management.
The increased interconnectedness of the data is accompanied by an intensive cross-disciplinary exchange between the participating scientists and their institutions. The resulting networks promise a sustainable foundation for the future, which not only connects the data, but also the researchers involved.