What are Research Infrastructures?
According to the definition of the European Commission, research infrastructures are facilities that provide resources and services for research communities to conduct research and foster innovation.
They can be used beyond research e.g. for education or public services and they may be single-sited, distributed, or virtual.
They include
- major scientific equipment or sets of instruments
- collections, archives or scientific data
- computing systems and communication networks
- any other research and innovation infrastructure of a unique nature which is open to external users
In the domain of the humanities, a digital research infrastructure, such as DARIAH EU, Apollonis and DARIAH-GR/DYAS, promotes research in a digital environment, providing digital resources, services and tools and expertise.
What are the Humanities?
The humanities are the academic disciplines that record, process, analyze and interpret human thought and experience throughout time. According to one of the prevailing systems of classification, these are linguistic studies, philology, history, archaeology, philosophy, anthropology, theology and religion, law and the arts.
What is Digital Humanities?
Digital Humanities refers to the research and education of the humanities conducted using digital methods and tools. It is an academic discipline where the computer sciences and the humanities combine their expertise in the production and distribution of knowledge. By making use of web technologies, they also promote a collaborative approach and interdisciplinarity in research and education. They combine the practices, form and systems of the “traditional” humanities (eg history, philosophy, philology, etc.) with the applications and tools of computers (such as data and text mining, data visualization, etc.), to offer a new approach to research and specifically: (a) to answer research questions, (b) to challenge existing theories and (c) to formulate new questions.
What is Apollonis?
Apollonis is the national infrastructure that enables digital research in the arts and humanities, and supports language technology and innovation in Greece.
It arose from the partnership of the two infrastructure components CLARIN:EL and DARIAH-GR/DYAS and has as its primary object in the current phase to further develop and consolidate the services of the two infrastructure components, within a framework of interoperability and mutual support. At the same time, Greece’s participation in the corresponding European infrastructures continues.
What is DARIAH-EU?
DARIAH EU is a research infrastructure that enhances and supports digitally enabled research and teaching across the Arts and Humanities.
DARIAH is a network of people, expertise, information, knowledge, content, methods, tools and technologies from its member countries. It develops, maintains and operates an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices and sustains researchers in using them to build, analyse and interpret digital resources. By working with communities of practice, DARIAH brings together individual state-of-the-art digital arts and humanities activities and scales their results to a European level. It preserves, provides access to and disseminates research that stems from these collaborations and ensures that best practices, methodological and technical standards are followed.
What is DARIAH-GR/DYAS?
The Humanities Research Infrastructure Network DYAS implements the mission of the Greek research infrastructure for the arts and humanities DARIAH-GR. The infrastructure supports the Greek scholarly communities of the arts and humanities and contributes to the development of research using information technologies; it expands the scope of research through the interconnection of distributed digital resources of various kinds; it promotes access, use, creation and long-term preservation of research data in digital format; and it supports the exchange of knowledge, methods and working practices between scholarly communities.
What does DARIAH-GR/DYAS offer?
Among other things, DARIAH-GR/DYAS offers:
- Access to digital resources (data, terminology, standards, software) developed by the research community
- Enabling the community to develop, evaluate and test these resources
- Support in the creation of local mechanisms and systems for the reliable management of research data
- A dynamic single information space for the humanities through the interoperability of systems and data, which facilitates the reuse of resources and tools in new contexts and questions, and enhances interdisciplinarity
- Support for the dissemination of the use of open tools for research and the development of a collaborative environment
- Dissemination of the knowledge and skills required for the effective use of digital resources and information technologies in the humanities
- Contribution to the promotion of an open access policy, the development and consolidation of intellectual property rights clearing mechanisms and systems, and the overcoming of obstacles to the dissemination of information and knowledge
- Promoting ways for the widest possible social use of humanities digital resources for educational and recreational purposes
- Facilitating the use by the Greek research community of European digital resources, tools and services through participation in the DARIAH-EU infrastructure
- Ensuring the visibility, use and dissemination of Greek digital research resources in the European research space by leveraging and strengthening the relationship with European infrastructures.
Who are the members of DYAS?
- Academy of Athens (Coordinator)
- “Athina” Research Center – Digital Curation Unit (DCU)
- National and Kapodistrian University of Athens – Department of History and Archaeology
- Research University Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) – National Technical University of Athens
- School of Fine Arts
- Information Systems Laboratory (IPS) – Informatics Institute – Technology and Research Foundation
Who does it concern?
DARIAH-GR/DYAS is addressed to the following categories of users:
- a) Humanities professionals engaged in research and education (researchers, academics, masters and doctoral candidates, individual researchers)
- b) Information, cultural heritage and art management professionals (librarians, archivists, museum curators, information managers, visual and performing arts professionals)
- c) ICT professionals (researchers, software engineers)
- d) Data providers (universities, research institutes, libraries, archives, museums, government agencies)
- e) Teachers of all levels
- f) Private sector enterprises etc.
What is open access?
Open access (OA) is the application of free, direct, permanent and fee- and restriction-free online access to digital scientific content that allows reuse. DARIAH-GR/DYAS promotes the principles of Open Data Availability and Free Software/Open Source Software. However, pre-existing distribution permissions to resources joining the network are respected.
What is Open Science?
Open science is the practice of science in a way that allows for the participation and contribution of others, where research data, laboratory notes, and other research processes are freely available, under conditions that allow the research and the underlying data and methods to be reused, redistributed, and reproduced.
