blog: HERA Conference - 'European diversities - European identities'

At the recent HERA conference in Strasbourg , ‘European diversities – European identities’ there was a lot of talk about the digital future for the humanities. One of the panels – billed on the conference programme as ‘Young Scholars’ Visions: New Research through New Research Infrastructures’ – focussed on digital infrastructures for enabling research. As one of the main themes of the conference was to highlight the collaborative projects which HERA has made one of its key missions, the use of digital technology to support collaborative work was very visible.

In the aforementioned digital humanities panel, several fascinating historical and geographical projects were presented by researchers from Denmark, Ireland, Italy, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Both DARIAH and CLARIN – the two humanities projects funded by the European Commission under the auspices of Framework Programme Seven – received prominent mention. CLARIN was presented by Hanne Fersøe from the University of Copenhagen who explained the workings of the CLARIN consortium and the processes of large-scale pan-European collaboration to create, coordinate and make language resources and technology available and readily useable.

DARIAH was presented more from the point of view of the research which it is setting out to enable. Using the example of the 1641 Depositions Project , Elaine Murphy argued that a digital research infrastructure such as DARIAH is essential for ensuring that the €1 million invested by the AHRC and the IRCHSS on this groundbreaking digitization project is wisely and fruitfully spent. DARIAH – which will support digital research both technically and strategically – will enable provision of advice, supply standards documentation, encourage networking and build technical solutions to infrastructure problems. In fulfilling this mission the project aims to help those European countries who are on the margins of the digital humanities to develop their own national infrastructures, while simultaneously building an international infrastructure to link them together. In the grand vision, the infrastructure will allow researchers across Europe to collaborate with each other and interact with electronic resources at a level which facilitates high-level research.

Another highlight of the conference was Ian Gregory’s fascinating paper on the potentials and perils of using GIS for humanities research. In addition to highlighting work that has been done across the world using GIS, he talked about his recent collaborations with literary scholars on mapping the Lake District journeys of the poets Thomas Gray and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

If any of the several directors of the national research councils in the room missed the point, it is clear that international digital research infrastructures are an essential for answering key questions in the humanities in the twenty-first century.