###Apologies for cross-postings###
Workshop: Digital Curation in the Human Sciences
ECDL, Corfu, 30 September – 1 October 2009
Do you wish to find out about the leading projects working towards the
establishment of the European digital infrastructures for research in the
humanities and social science? Are you interested in the conceptual and
technical challenges faced by those involved in designing and building
these infrastructures? Are you curious how digital curation could help
ensure the longevity and future usefulness of scholarly evidence and social
research data? Do you want to find out more about the information practices
and requirements of humanists and social scientists in the digital age? Do
you have an argument, issue or viewpoint relevant to these issues, which
you would like to discuss with a growing interdisciplinary community of
practice?
The Digital Curation in the Human Sciences workshop aims to act as a focus
for a fruitful dialogue among major stakeholders in human science research
infrastructures: policy makers and planners of the emerging European
digital infrastructures, computer science and information science
researchers in the field of digital libraries, e-repository, collections
and data managers, practising curators, archivists and librarians, and
active researchers from the whole spectrum of the human sciences interested
into, or dependent upon, the use of information resources and tools for
research. This long overdue meeting of complementary perspectives will,
hopefully, act as a catalyst for a convergence of conceptual and technical
approaches between different projects, in Europe and beyond, and for an
alignment of current efforts with the actual requirements, know-how and
expertise of key user communities.
---Workshop programme:---
Wednesday, 30 September 2009, 14:30 – 18:30
Session 1: Presentation of ESFRI projects for the human sciences (14:30 –
16:00).
Chair: Costis Dallas
Hilary Beedham, UK Data Archive, University of Essex, United Kingdom - The
CESSDA research infrastructure: formalising 30 years’ experience
Martin Wynne, Oxford eResearch Centre, Oxford University, United Kingdom
– Preserving Babel: CLARIN and the preservation of language resources
Peter Doorn, Data Archiving and Networked Service (DANS), The Netherlands
– DARIAH: Paving the way for the digital research infrastructure for the
arts and humanities in Europe
16:00-16:30: Break
Session 2: Digital curation and supporting research in the human sciences
through digital technologies: theoretical and methodological perspectives
(16.30 -18.30)
Chair: Peter Doorn
Three invited papers introducing pespectives of significant theoretical,
methodological or substantive interest on aspects of the overall theme of
the workshop.
- Rob Procter, National Centre for e-Social Science, University of
Manchester, United Kindgom
- Seamus Ross, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada
- Panos Constantopoulos, Digital Curation Unit (DCU) - IMIS, Athena
Research Centre & Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economcs
and Business, Greece
Thursday, 1 October 2009, 9:00 – 13:00
Session 3: Digital curation, registries, research repositories and digital
libraries (9.00 – 10:30)
Chair: Panos Constantopoulos
Tobias Blanke, Centre for e-Research, King’s College, University of
London, United Kingdom – From a collection of tools and services towards
a research infrastructure for the arts and humanities
Rene van Horik, Data Archiving and Networked Service (DANS), The
Netherlands – Migration to Intermediate XML for Electronic Data (Mixed)
10:30-11:00: Break
Session 4: Panel discussion on Requirements for digital infrastructures in
the human sciences: views from the field (11:00-13:00).
Chair: Seamus Ross
Complementary stakeholder and evidence-based perspectives towards
understanding scholarly information work and digital research
infrastructures in the human sciences will be represented in the panel,
including:
- Elaine Toms, Centre for Management Informatics, Dalhousie University,
Canada
- Eric Peter Haswell, Department of Scandinavian Research, Nordic Research
Institute, Denmark
- Costis Dallas, Digital Curation Unit (DCU) - IMIS, Athena Research Centre
& Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University,
Greece; and, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada
--Workshop Theme:--
Research in the human sciences is predominantly information-driven, often
idiographic rather than nomothetic, and dependent on complex associations
of phenomena, differentiated disciplinary languages, and divergent
theoretical and methodological perspectives. Unlike the natural sciences,
the outcome of earlier work, manifested in massive webs of monographs,
research papers and encyclopaedic works, retains its value in the "long
tail". Large-scale digitization in cultural heritage, the arts and letters,
together with the explosion of born-digital information on contemporary
societies, pose significant new challenges of resource discovery and
interoperability, producing a need for interdisciplinary, collaborative
research agendas and action plans to tackle issues of long-term digital
preservation and adequate knowledge representation of information in a
number of scholarly domains. The information resources on which the
production and reproduction of knowledge in the human sciences depends are
increasingly reconfigured in the form of digital libraries, digital
collections and e-repositories.
Digital curation, an important theme in ECDL 2009, aims to address exactly
this pressing need to ensure future epistemic adequacy of information
objects on which knowledge in the human sciences depends. It encompasses a
set of activities aiming at the production of high quality, dependable
digital assets; their organisation, archiving and long-term preservation;
and the generation of added value from digital assets by means of
resource-based knowledge elicitation. The need to ensure adequate
representation and long-term access to digital information as its context
of use changes introduces a grand challenge for digital curation research:
to develop the conceptual and technological tools necessary for maintaining
and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and
future use, through the active questioning, dynamic co-evolution and
adequate knowledge representation of its epistemic and pragmatic content
and context.
This workshop aims to provide a focus for a broad-ranging discussion on
issues related to the conceptualisation, design, development and
functioning of planned digital research infrastructures for the human
sciences, in Europe and beyond, from a digital curation perspective. It
concerns directly the theory and practice of research digital libraries, at
the conceptual, technical and organisational level, and will facilitate the
exchange of ideas, best practices and the convergence of future directions
between projects of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures
(ESFRI) in the human sciences (such as DARIAH, CLARIN, and CESDDA), in the
context of similar developments across the Atlantic. The programme will
consist of presentations of current developments in these project, invited
position papers on key issues of digital curation, research repositories
and digital libraries, and a stakeholders’ panel on requirements for
digital infrastructures in the human sciences.
--Chairs:--
- Costis Dallas, Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion
University; Faculty of Information, University of Toronto; and, Digital
Curation Unit (DCU), "Athena" Research Centre, Greece
- Peter Doorn, Data Archiving and Networking Service (DANS), The
Netherlands
--Program Committee:--
- Panos Constantopoulos, Department of Informatics, Athens University of
Economics and Business; and, Digital Curation Unit (DCU) - IMIS, "Athena"
Research Centre, Greece
- Costis Dallas (Chair), Digital Curation Unit (DCU) - IMIS, Athena
Research Centre & Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion
University, Greece; and, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto,
Canada
- Martin Doerr, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation Research and
Technology, Greece
- Peter Doorn (Chair), Data Archiving and Networking Service (DANS), The
Netherlands
- Seamus Ross, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada
- Helen Tibbo, School of Information and Library Science, University of
North Carolina, United States
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