Author Archives: Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra

The 6 core principles of the Heritage Data Reuse Charter are integrated into the ELEXIS framework for the quality assessment of lexicographical datasets

Solidifying evaluative frameworks around scholarly objects and outputs that deviate from the well established units of an academic book or research paper is a key challenge we face in the transition towards the open research culture.

The Lexicographic Data Seal of Compliance (LexSeal) aims to tackle this challenge by proposing a community-based certificate of compliance with best scholarly practices to be awarded to individual lexicographic datasets in recognition of their creators’ self-assessed and well-documented adherence to the principles of trustworthiness, interoperability, stewardship, citability, reciprocity and openness.


These six dimensions of LexSeal taken together describe the infrastructural fitness-for-
purpose of a given lexicographic dataset, i.e. the degree to which the dataset aligns with
best practices and technical standards within a larger network of machine- and human-
readable lexicographic data.

You can access the framework here:

Toma Tasovac, Laurent Romary, Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, Irena Marinski. Lexicographic Data Seal of Compliance. [Research Report] ELEXIS; DARIAH. 2021. ⟨hal-03344267

Implementation of the Heritage Data Reuse Charter with a twist: The DARIAH-Campus Reuse Charter

In celebration of Day of DH2020, the team behind DARIAH-Campus released the first version of the DARIAH-Campus Reuse Charter.

Inspired by the Heritage Data Reuse Charter, the DARIAH-Campus Reuse Charter expresses the clear commitment within DARIAH to the six core principles of Reciprocity, Interoperability, Citability, Openness, Stewardship and Trustworthiness, and shows how this commitment is reflected in the design and daily operations of the DARIAH-Campus platform.

You can access the DARIAH-Campus Reuse Charter here: https://campus.dariah.eu/docs/reuse-charter

For more information and context, please find the press release here: https://www.dariah.eu/2020/04/29/the-more-we-share-the-more-we-have-dariah-campus-reuse-charter-released/

DARIAH releases position paper on digitised cultural heritage

(press release originally published on the 29th of October 2020 here: https://www.dariah.eu/2020/10/29/dariah-releases-position-paper-on-digitised-cultural-heritage/

The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) is happy to share with the wider community its position paper on digitised cultural heritage.

“We really can’t stress enough how important cultural heritage is for humanists,” said DARIAH Director Toma Tasovac. “Without digitised and born-digital cultural heritage, undertaking humanities research with digital methods would be practically impossible.”

Europe still faces significant challenges when it comes to the effective and efficient digitisation of our cultural heritage. With over 80% of Europe’s cultural heritage remaining to be digitised, there is an urgent need to re-think the European digitisation strategy in order to enable Member States to more effectively work together towards the European Commission’s ambitious, but no longer achievable, target of all European cultural heritage being digitised by 2025.

“Cultural heritage and research are traditionally seen as two separate sectors, yet the overlap and the need for tighter cooperation between the two is obvious”, Tasovac said.

For instance, a large proportion of Europe’s cultural heritage that has already been digitised is rapidly approaching its ‘sell-by’ date. Being ‘first generation’ or ‘legacy’ digitisation, it is no longer of a high enough quality for analysis using advanced digital humanities methods.

DARIAH’s position paper entitled “Cultural Heritage Data as Humanities Research Data” was submitted to the European Commission as part of the EC’s evaluation of the Recommendation of 27 October 2011 on Digitisation and Online Accessibility of Cultural Material and Digital Preservation (REC 2011/711/EU).

In the coming weeks, DARIAH plans to release a survey in order to collect feedback from both researchers and cultural heritage professionals on the topics discussed in the paper. To download “Cultural Heritage Data as Humanities Research Data: a DARIAH Position Paper”, click here.

“The Heritage Data Reuse Charter: from principles to research workflows ” working paper published

There is a growing need to establish domain-or discipline-specific approaches to research data sharing workflows. A defining feature of data and data workflows in the arts and humanities domain is their dependence on cultural heritage sources hosted and curated in museums, libraries, galleries and archives. A major difficulty when scholars interact with heritage data is that the nature of the cooperation between researchers and Cultural Heritage Institutions (henceforth CHIs) is often constrained by structural and legal challenges but even more by uncertainties as to the expectations of both parties. The Heritage Data Reuse Charter aims to address these by designing a common environment that will enable all the relevant actors to work together to connect and improve access to heritage data and make transactions related to the scholarly use of cultural heritage data more visible and transparent. As a first step, a wide range of stakeholders on the Cultural Heritage and research sector agreed upon a set of generic principles, summarized in the Mission Statement of the Charter, that can serve as a baseline governing the interactions between CHIs, researchers and data centres. This was followed by a long and thorough validation process related to these principles through surveys 1 and workshops 2. As a second step, we now put forward a questionnaire template tool that helps researchers and CHIs to translate the 6 core principles into specific research project settings. It contains questions about access to data, provenance information, preferred citation standards, hosting responsibilities etc. on the basis of which the parties can arrive at mutual reuse agreements that could serve as a starting point for a FAIR-by-construction data management, right from the project planning/application phase. The questionnaire template and the resulting mutual agreements can be flexibly applied to projects of different scale and in platform-independent ways. Institutions can embed them into their own exchange protocols while researchers can add them to their Data Management Plans. As such, they can show evidence for responsible and fair conduct of cultural heritage data, and fair (but also FAIR) research data management practices that are based on partnership with the holding institution.

You can access the full paper here: Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, Laurent Romary. The Heritage Data Reuse Charter: from principles to research workflows. 2020. ⟨halshs-02475692⟩

Cultural Heritage Reuse Cases: Facilitating the Exchange of Perspectives between Heritage Professionals and Researchers

Workshop at the DARIAH Annual Event –

Wednesday 15 May, from 16.00 to 18.00

The DARIAH annual events bring together humanities scholars with a strong vocation for new ways of knowledge production. As a European Research Infrastructure for the Humanities and Arts, DARIAH addresses the complex topic of Humanities Data at the DARIAH Annual Event 2019. On the occasion of this year’s event, DARIAH and Europeana Research have co-organised a workshop to further align the vision of the Data Reuse Charter with communities of practice, and to outline the next steps towards its implementation.

The workshop will focus on the identification of the major gaps that typically occur in interactions between cultural heritage institutions and researchers under different settings.

We will bring together (re)use case studies from the cultural heritage sector presented by Europeana Research and from the research world presented by humanities scholars from the DARIAH network. These inputs could be co-analyzed and discussed together to uncover those critical aspects of the respective workflows where the two perspectives find less resonance with each other.

Outline:

  1. Introduction and summary of the progress made on the Heritage Data Reuse Charter (Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, DARIAH-EU)
  2. Introduction about Europeana Research and the Europeana Research Community (Alba Irollo, Europeana Foundation)
  3. Reuse cases presented by Cultural Heritage professionals (Steven Claeyssens, Curator of Digital Collections at the National Library of Netherlands, The Hague / NL); Erik Buelinckx, Head of Photo Collection, Library and Digitisation at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Brussels / BE);
  4. Debate
  5. Reuse cases presented by arts and humanities scholars (Marie Puren, the SILKNOW project; Sally Chambers The Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities);
  6. Debate
  7. Wrap-up

You can follow the discussion on twitter via the #datareusecharter hashtag.

Cite this article as: "Cultural Heritage Reuse Cases: Facilitating the Exchange of Perspectives between Heritage Professionals and Researchers," in Heritage Data Reuse Charter, 09/05/2019, https://datacharter.hypotheses.org/308.