CLARIAH-PLUS

The humanities investigate human culture: how people interact, the works of art and literature they produce, how we organize our society, how we think, write, create photographs and films. The humanities include the language we use for all these activities and for reflecting upon them, these reflections and our attempts to change and renew our lives, politics and culture. Information on human culture is “hidden” in enormous amounts of unstructured data, such as texts written and printed over centuries, and audio-visual documents produced since the last quarter of the 19th Century. Many of these data are available in digital form, in fact too many to investigate without the assistance of advanced digital methods. CLARIAH-PLUS aims to provide the CLARIAH research infrastructure with facilities to support the humanities researcher in each phase of research. CLARIAH-PLUS will provide integrated access to unprecedented collections of seamlessly interoperating digital research resources and innovative tools to process them in virtual workspaces, thus enabling data intensive science in the humanities. It will do this by providing virtual research environments with user interfaces dedicated to the intended users that offer a range of pre-defined recipes. It will also offer facilities to construct one’s own recipe, inter alia by modifying a pre-defined recipe. These recipes enable researchers to apply a range of tools to selected data and thus run through each of the phases of a research project with support of advanced digital tools. CLARIAH-PLUS extends and expands the CLARIAH-CORE project, which initiated the CLARIAH infrastructure. CLARIAH-CORE focused on linguistics, social economic history and media studies, but CLARIAH-PLUS includes humanities researchers who need advanced techniques to extract content from texts: scholars in literary studies, history, religious studies, and philosophy. CLARIAH-PLUS will provide the Netherlands’ part of the European CLARIN and DARIAH infrastructures, enabling Dutch scholars to maintain their leading position in European Digital Humanities. CLARIAH-PLUS also will establish an intensive cooperation with the National Library of the Netherlands (KB), which is an essential supplier of digitized texts in Dutch, and a rising player in Digital Humanities. Many of the questions that humanities scholars investigate are highly relevant for societal problems. We would not know how to measure climate change without historical data. The same holds true for the question whether income and property are divided more equally or unequally in the long run. Without the humanities we cannot know about human experiences with migration, the formation of national identity, language change through international contact, the influence of national languages on dialects, the effects of new media on society, the clout of dominant cultures, the role of communication in all these developments. CLARIAH-PLUS is therefore highly relevant for many questions and routes of the Dutch National Research Agenda and for many challenges of Horizon2020. Companies and public organisations, esp. in the top sector Creative Industry and in the cross-sectoral ICT Roadmap, support CLARIAH, because it addresses problems they are also facing. Dissemination activities, educational programs and training sessions will enable researchers and students to acquaint themselves with new research methodologies. Advanced Digital Humanities scholars will use CLARIAH to buttress their international leading position in their fields. An intensive outreach programme will help create opportunities for developing applications and services relevant for society or commerce.