Sustaining a Digital Humanities Infrastructure and Network for Austria
A DARIAH Impact Case Study
In their annual report of 2023 DARIAH-EU put a spotlight onto Austria to get a closer look into the accomplishments of the Austrian National Consortium within the last year.
What did we do?
Since its inception in 2019, the CLARIAH-AT consortium, representing the Austrian universities and research institutions which coordinate and drive Austrian activities related to the ESFRI research infrastructures CLARIN and DARIAH, has rapidly built a reputation for excellence and cooperation.
The latest evidence of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research (BMBWF)’s confidence in CLARIAH-AT’s proven track record of success, is the approval of a project which aims to provide the Austrian DH community with the collaborative infrastructure required for the future development of the use of digitised data, research software and data science in humanities and cultural studies research ( DHInfra.at ).
Why did we do it?
Through collaboration and sharing of expertise and resources, CLARIAH-AT aims to foster DH research and engagement with digital academic resources, not only among scholars and professionals but also the general public.
Who did we do it for?
CLARIAH-AT activities, services and expertise are aimed at and open to the entire Austrian Digital Humanities community, regardless of their affiliation to one of the CLARIAH-AT consortium partner institutions.
Overview
A collaboration between the Austrian universities of Graz, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt, Krems, Salzburg and Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Austrian National Library, CLARIAH-AT brings together Austrian institutions with relevant expertise in research, development and teaching in the field of Digital Humanities as well as in the establishment and sustainable operation of research (data) infrastructures, which also play an active role in the development of Austrian Digital Humanities in general. Based on these stakeholders’ experience and a consultation of the Austrian professional DH community, the consortium authored a vision for the further development of Austrian Digital Humanities, along the four respective pillars of Research infrastructures and networks, Research data and repositories, Methods, services and tools and Education, training and knowledge transfer.
Closely tied to these focal points, the consortium has engaged in several activities to bring their vision to life. A dedicated funding call on “ Interoperability and Reusability of DH Data and Tools ”, financed through the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research (BMBWF)’s support dedicated to CLARIAH-AT and the consortium’s membership fees, led to the realisation of 16 projects which were all implemented in late 2023 or early 2024, with a total budget of 382.777 Euros.
Furthermore, the CLARIAH-AT consortium forms the backbone of the DHInfra.at project: in 2022, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research (BMBWF) issued the call “(Digital) research infrastructures”, a call for proposals for the sustainable development of universities in the context of digitalisation, funded with support from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), aimed at the expansion, modernisation and/or acquisition of high-quality (digital) research infrastructure at Austrian universities.
Digital Humanities Infrastructure Austria (DHInfra.at) is building an infrastructure for digitally supported research in the Austrian humanities. It fills the gap between standard offers in cultural heritage institutions (digitisation), in research data management (curated and integrated repositories vs. institutional repositories), in software solutions (subject-specific open source products), and in HPC infrastructures common in the natural, technical and life sciences regarding the processing of large amounts of data with machine learning methods.
Equipment for digitisation (scanning robots, multispectral cameras) and storage (Ceph) for repositories for data from memory institutions, as well as GPU clusters for the research-driven development and productive use of machine learning methods are procured and implemented. Open source software is also developed and customised to meet the specific needs of the DH community.
The CLARIAH-AT consortium facilitates the governance and long-term maintenance of the infrastructure and makes it available to the Austrian DH community at large, taking its inspiration from examples like the Danish DeiC Interactive HPC infrastructure .
The DHInfra.at project was one of 19 out of 69 submissions approved, and the only project which was accepted without any budget cuts, receiving funding of 2,2 million Euro (in addition to the consortium partners’ in-kind contributions of approx. 1 million Euro). As the ministry evaluation put it, this was largely due to the CLARIAH-AT consortium’s involvement:
[DHInfra.at] draws on the proven CLARIAH-AT consortium with well-established decision-making processes and is therefore also connected to the European infrastructures CLARIN-ERIC and DARIAH-EU.
Description of the Impact
In the years since the CLARIAH-AT consortium was established, considerable progress has been made in establishing, fostering and sustaining Digital Humanities activities in Austria. In addition to (and as part of) the project call above, CLARIAH-AT has hosted several Schools, Workshops and other training events. University Master Programs and Professors for Digital Humanities have been established at the Universities of Graz and Vienna (with their holders taking an active role in the consortium itself) over the last 7 years. Highly competitive ERC grants have been awarded to Austrian Digital Humanities researchers (among them the aforementioned professors).
Another tangible result of CLARIAH-AT’s reputation and efforts in community building are close cooperations with Austrian Cultural Heritage institutions and organisations ( Museumsbund.at , Time Machine Organisation , …). CLARIAH-AT has also been invited to join the Austrian National advisory board of the UNESCO Memory of the World programme. Furthermore, the speaker of the CLARIAH-AT consortium is an elected member of the Board of the Association of Digital Humanities in the German-speaking Areas (DHd) - evidence of both the standing of CLARIAH-AT in the Austrian DH community and the standing of the Austrian DH community in the German-speaking areas.
A particular highlight in July 2023, was that the University of Graz hosted the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO) Digital Humanities 2023 conference: Collaboration as Opportunity (DH2023) which attracted 872 participants. DARIAH-EU was one of the two main sponsors of this conference, and CLARIAH-AT contributed additional sponsorship. An even more visible contribution of DARIAH-EU to the success of this conference was the role of DARIAH-EU’s President of the Board of Directors Toma Tasovac as one of the DH2023 program chairs, sharing his expertise, passion and visionary reflections on revolutions with the global community.
In addition to these examples of the appreciation of the national and international DH community, the consortium’s reputation with national ministries and funding agencies is documented by these bodies’ presence in CLARIAH-AT’s Advisory Board and the success of project submissions closely affiliated with the consortium: as mentioned above, the DHInfra. at project, which is establishing a joint infrastructure for digital research in the humanities in four fields and develops and implements the governance required for its use, and is being made available to the Austrian national DH community, sustained and managed through the CLARIAH-AT consortium.
Evidence of the Impact
As demonstrated above, CLARIAH-AT and Digital Humanities in Austria are a remarkable success story. The CLARIAH-AT consortium itself has become a stakeholder recognised by Austrian Federal Ministries, national UNESCO bodies and Cultural Heritage associations.
The professionalisation of the consortium is evident in the Digital Humanities Austria Strategy 2021+ and the financial commitment of the Austrian consortium institutions which is in turn backed up by funding from the Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research (BMBWF).
It is evident that CLARIAH-AT’s involvement has directly affected the evaluation and success of submissions in highly competitive national funding calls demonstrating its national impact. Furthermore, highly visible Austrian contributions to the international Digital Humanities community - from hosting the ADHO Digital Humanities 2023 conference in Graz to occupying leadership positions in international associations and the European Infrastructure consortia DARIAH-EU (e.g. Matej Durco as Chief Technical officer) and CLARIN-ERIC - demonstrate Austria’s international reputation.
DARIAH annual report 2023