EHRI participating in workshop on using European Infrastructures for Humanities Research

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Wednesday, 28 October, 2015

On 12 and 13 October 2015, a delegation from EHRI participated in a Europeana Research Workshop, entitled: “Using European Infrastructures for Humanities research: Scoping Content, Tools and Users”. Hosted by ATHENA Digital Curation Unit (DCU), the workshop brought together several key stakeholders of Europeana (Research Infrastructures, projects, e-content experts and digital humanists) for a workshop with the aim to create a discourse and a brainstorming revolving around the use of digital content in the Europeana portal for research. Next to EHRI, other projects were presented included DARIAH Teach, the Pelagios project, and IPERION CH and Parthenos.

What is Europeana Research?

Europeana Research aims to create stronger connections between humanities research and the digitised content of Europe’s galleries, museums, libraries and archives.

After more than 7 year of aggregation, and over 300 million digitized objects, Europeana Research aims to help the research communities in a range of different disciplines, such as Historians, Archaeologists, Linguists, social Anthropologists and many other, to engage to explore and take advantage of the Europeana digital content.

Furthermore, Europeana Research wishes to serve as a platform and create an ecosystem for many communities of practice by promoting discourse between researchers, and by developing tools for the research communities.

Who are the users and which digital content are we talking about?

There were two round table discussions where two major subjects were discussed. One discussion focused on who the users of Europeana Research are, and the second discussion focused on Digital Content and Metadata for Research. After identifying the different user communities of Europeana (such as private users, research communities and even other Virtual Research Environments), the discussions revolved around the ways in which Europeana can be useful for the different users communities. Furthermore, Europeana Research asked the different stakeholders about the role of digital content in digital history, and wanted to understand how the data is being used.

Thematic use cases

Although there are still some fundamental issues to be resolved, in terms of data licensing, copyrights, interoperability, one of the recommendations for Europeana at the end of the workshop was to engage with partner infrastructures and create thematic use cases, in order to show how Europeana can help the research community with its vastly available digital content, and with the help of tools and methodologies that were developed within the Europeana framework.

In the parallel twitter universe, many of the discussions and thoughts on the discussed issues were documented and retweeted. Please visit #EuropeanaAthens.