TextGrid Newsletter 05 [July 2008]

Report about the e-Humanities Strategy Workshop

The e-Humanities strategy workshop on 1 April 2008 in Göttingen aimed at opening a discussion of shared activities concerning the development of an e-Humanities infrastructure in Germany. Representatives of the funding institutions (Ministry of Education and Research, BMBF, and German Research Foundation, DFG), the TextGrid project executive organization (German Aerospace Center, DLR), researchers from various institutions (Max Planck Digital Library, Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics), and researchers of the TextGrid team participated in the workshop discussing general questions as well as individual steps on the road to German e-Humanities. After an initial phase of collecting ideas, the issues at hand could be divided into four topic groups. These topics were examined in small workgroups:

Research Data

Only central institutions are able to ensure long-term curation of research data, to accumulate knowledge about and experience with data formats, and to administer and advocate standards. A prerequisite for these tasks is manpower; i.e. a ‘human’ infrastructure, apart from the technical one, is necessary. Besides technological, administrative, legal and service-related problems concerning research data, there are problems of quality management to be solved. In order to put this vision into practice, specific funding strategies should be conceptualized.

Virtual Research Environments

Above all, it should be possible to put together a virtual research environment ad hoc and with minimal effort from existing services. Thus new services could come into being out of project-specific requirements. In order to guarantee technological and semantic interoperability (of services and data), the definition of the interfaces is very important. Additionally, project forums and service descriptions contribute to forming a mutual conceptual understanding within a virtual research environment.

Community Building

The vision of community building is interdisciplinary, international collaborative work. Virtual research environments like TextGrid, with their principles of openness and collaboration, immanently enable this, creating new perspectives and changing the culture of research. This, in turn, promotes acceptance within the communities.

Research and Financing

A distinction should be made between the financing of the basic infrastructure and of individual research. Financing the basic infrastructure is a permanent task, for which responsibilities, in Germany, have not yet been defined. Possible agents within a sustainability chain could be funders, researchers, academic institutions, libraries and computer centers.

In Germany there is, at this stage, no structural financing model for projects whose status is on a medium level between long-term provision of basic infrastructures and short-term funding of research projects. It was suggested that the US model of NEH Challenge Grants should be adopted.

For securing the availability of electronic data on a long-term base, pragmatic strategies were discussed. Funders should develop data policies and have data curation strategies of proposed research projects certified. Costs for data curation should be considered in proposals. A data lump sum would be the logical extension of the publication lump sum granted by the DFG. Funders should insist on detailed data curation descriptions in final reports of research projects.

The selection the data to be preserved should be conceded to the researchers. However, the ingest process has to be administrated and should include a gratification system and a system of mentoring by library professionals. How the administration of data preservation processes could be organized by the funders, is an open question. In this respect, Germany lags behind other nations. Analyzing national data curation strategies in other countries, it should be evaluated whether federal or central structures are advisable for Germany.

A national roadmap of awareness raising, concerted funding strategies and international visibility has to be developed. Universitys and federal state governments have to be convinced to build up appropriate structures.

In the discussion emerged two possibilities of getting results within a short time.

1. Using the DFG priority programmes for project funding and networking. In the arts and humanities, these funding programs have been scarcely used; well-founded proposals for emerging-field topics would be welcome.
2. Proposing finances for translation of research results of projects for international visibility.

Outlook

A detailed analysis of the German research infrastructure in the arts and humanities and recommendations on the course of actions are expected from the Wissenschaftsrat (German Science and Humanities Council). A draft of a respective statement is to be published in January 2010.