CLARIN Café: Project Management in DH

When: Monday, March 10th 2025; 15:00 - 17:00 (CET)

Where: CLARIN virtual Zoom Meeting

Registration: Please register for free using this link in order to receive the meeting room details.

General Information

This CLARIN Café is co-organised by CLARIN-ERIC, and the DH Course Registry Working Group as a follow-up to the DH Graduates: Bridging Gaps Between Industry & Education workshop, an initiative supported by CLARIN and the DARIAH Funding Scheme for Working Group Activities 2023-2025 . The initiative examines how DH programs in Europe and the USA equip graduates for careers in academia, the public sector, and industry. It also investigates how research infrastructures, such as CLARIN and DARIAH, can assist universities in fostering their students’ digital competencies through open access to language data repositories, language resources, services, tools, and learning materials.

The CLARIN hosts are Vincent Vandeghinste and Iulianna van der Lek.

A full overview of planned Café sessions can be found on the CLARIN Café page .

About

The topic of this café is project management and team collaboration in Digital Humanities projects. The guests from academia, industry and research infrastructures will discuss their experience and approaches to project management and how some of the principles and methods can be incorporated into DH research and teaching to improve the collaboration and efficiency of DH project teams. Depending on the size of a DH project, teams typically include researchers, students, faculty staff, technical experts, community partners, infrastructures, and/or representatives of the GLAM or industry sectors. This topic also ties in with the previous TwinTalks workshops , which investigated how researchers, teachers and professionals across disciplines and sectors can collaborate in a more creative and innovative way.

Target Audience

This café is designed for anyone looking to enhance their project management workflows and skills in the Digital Humanities field. It targets research teams managing Digital Humanities projects, program coordinators, lecturers who teach project management in academic programs, DH graduates working on projects in the creative and industry sectors, and professionals overseeing DH infrastructure projects. The café will also be of great interest to any students who, whether they know what career track they wish to embark upon or not, have a burning desire to get things done in their career: the natural builders and the natural creatives among the student body.

Programme

Presentation abstracts

Practical Approaches to Project and Data Management in the Digital Humanities: Skills, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

by Amelie Dorn and Seta Stuhec (ACDH-CH, OeAW)

This presentation will explore practical approaches to project and data management within the Digital Humanities (DH), focusing on necessary and required skills, common challenges, and typical lessons learned from real-world scenarios. Drawing on experiences from different DH projects, we will address key aspects of project management, highlighting also common challenges researchers face in areas such as data management, and archiving. The presentation will also reflect on the importance of equipping future scholars with the necessary skills and knowledge. Eventually, we will also address the role of research infrastructures like CLARIN and DARIAH in supporting these efforts.

FIN-CLARIAH - Navigating the national and local streams of infrastructure development in Finland

by Inés Matres (University of Helsinki, DH Hackathon team)

FIN - CLARIAH is the premier Finnish digital research infrastructure () for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) comprising two components, FIN-CLARIN and DARIAH-FI . In this presentation I will focus on DARIAH-FI, which comprises an inter- and multidisciplinary network of experts in digital humanities, computational social sciences, data science, alongside data providers in cultural heritage organisations and HPC technology providers. As a national infrastructure, much RI development occurs locally, that is, while I am one of the national coordinators of DARIAH-FI, it is the local teams in each university who are the main protagonists when it comes to surveying needs and requirements, and feed this into our development and support work. An overview of this network allows one to grasp the Finnish digital humanities landscape ranging from intellectual history to game studies or sociolinguistics. This interdisciplinarity aims to enable and speed up processes fundamental to SSH research with digitized or digital-born data in a wide range of fields. That is, each individual and team are involved themselves in processing large amounts of textual or visual data, or developing analysis tools and methods. This is made available to wider research communities, for example in the form of enriched datasets, or tools to access or break-down the data to further process it manually. RIs are also educational resources that enable upscaling the amount of data SSH researchers conventionally approach. On a local level, I will provide some insights on the organisation of the Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon, a different kind of summer school where students can experience a DH project from start to finish. The Helsinki DHH is an initiative nurtured locally since 2015 that has achieved national and international fame.

Ten Years of Project Management in Digital Humanities: Lessons from Princeton’s CDH

by Natalia Ermolaev (Princeton University)

Since its founding in 2014, the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton (CDH) has embraced project management (PM) as a form of scholarly exchange—the intellectual labor that makes meaningful collaboration in digital humanities possible. Over the past decade, we have developed and refined methodologies, processes, templates, and tools to guide DH projects toward success. In this talk, I will share key lessons from a decade of PM at CDH, tracing how our approach has evolved alongside shifts in organizational structure, scholarly priorities, and technological advancements. I will also highlight our graduate student professional development program, which prepares emerging scholars to navigate and lead digital projects. By reflecting on both challenges and successes, this talk offers insights into the role of PM in sustaining innovative and collaborative research in the humanities.

Applying High-Performance Management Principles in DH projects

by Maxi Gorynski and Supriya Rai

Management is a curious field, and because it is typically associated with the business sector, it often gets a short shrift in academia and the humanities in general. This is to considerable mutual disadvantage, when we consider that:

The precepts that govern it as a practice are notionally aimed at maximising positive outcomes for projects and the institutions undertaking them. That means that good management practices will benefit academics and scholars and professionals in humanities backgrounds every bit as much as they might any other discipline.
Huge advantage accrues to organisations that are realistic about management, while huge and frequent difficulties tend to befall those that are unrealistic about it, ignore it, or presume that it is simply a force of nature to be tolerated, rather than an art to be mastered.

The Digital Humanities is an ideal place to begin correcting theories of management and bringing them to a new stage in their evolution. Why? Because the best management requires both quantitative and technical grasp, and an artistic breadth of mind and negative capability; it requires the best attributes in both the science and the humanities. Therefore, no field of study is better suited to this challenge than the DH.

Therefore, this presentation aims to review principles of high-performance management, consider examples of how they can be used, and prepare the groundwork for teaching DH students, researchers and DH projects support and infrastructure staff, how to apply those principles to their careers and project work. Not only will this radically increase the yield and richness of any given DH project, helping every penny invested in them go further, it will also hugely increase the appeal of DH as an academic track to students.

Speakers

Amelie Dorn (ACDH-CH, OeAW)
Seta Stuhec (ACDH-CH, OeAW)
Inés Matres (University of Helsinki, DH Hackathon team)
Natalia Ermolaev (Princeton University)
Maxi Gorynski (DH graduate at King’s College in London, entrepreneur and product/software professional)
Supriya Rai (software and technology director)

Find the original announcement of this CLARIN Café on the CLARIN Website:

CLARIN Café: Project Management in DH