Co-Applicant

Humboldt-University of Berlin (HU) is one of the top five universities in Germany. It has held the status of a university of excellence since 2012 and is a member of the "Berlin University Alliance", which is shaping the future of Berlin as a centre of science and research. The digital transformation of science and society and new digital research environments are among the HU's development priorities in conjunction with the other on-site institutions, such as the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society or the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), in which the HU is involved or which it hosts, as well as initiatives such as the Humboldt Law Clinic Internet Law (HLCI) and others. With its Computer and Media Service (CMS) and the University Library (UB), one of the largest in Germany, the HU has a strong infrastructure, especially in the areas of Open Science, RDM and data literacy. The various projects and services include Laudatio (Long-term Access and Usage of Deeply Annotated Information) as a research data repository for texts as well as FDMentor and FDnext and the planned Scholarly Makerly Space for Digital Humanities in the field of RDM.
For the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute of History (IfG), Digital Humanities – and especially Digital History – are core elements of its strategic development, and it has a long tradition in this field. Since 1996, the communication platform H-Soz-Kult – which is run by the association Clio-Online with administrative and technical support from the IfG – has developed into a centrepiece of historical specialist communication in Germany with more than 30,000 subscribers, announcing more than 700 scientific events and publishing more than 1,000 reviews per year, covering all areas of historical research. This commitment has been consolidated by the establishment of the new professorship for Digital History in 2020, which will be followed by further professorships with a digital focus. This focus is supported by a Digital Humanities Working Group bringing together the expertise from all institutes of the faculty, including the Institute for Library and Information Science, which offers further resources in the area of digital research, research data management and research support.

Team

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

Task Area 5: Data Culture

Type

Scholarly and Research Institution

Co-Spokesperson

The German Historical Association (VHD, Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands e. V.) is the largest German scholarly association of professional historians, with 3400 members. Founded in 1895, the VHD is firmly established in the field and deeply rooted in the research community. Every two years, together with the Association of History Teachers (VGD), it organises one of the largest humanities conferences in Europe, with more than 4,000 participants, providing a vital forum for discussion and debate on current research questions, research results and innovative methodological approaches. Apart from organising these biennial meetings, the VHD’s main task is promoting the study of history and, above all, representing German historians vis-à-vis the public and political representatives, especially with regard to cultural and academic policy. Since 2004, it has awarded the renowned Hedwig Hintze Prize for outstanding dissertations and the Carl Erdmann Prize for outstanding habilitations. The VHD covers all historical epochs and sub-disciplines, and currently maintains specialised working groups: Applied History/Public History, World Regional and Global History, Early Modern Times, International History and Regional History. Since 2012, it has addressed the digital turn in the humanities through the formation of a further working group on Digital History (VHD-DGW). Since September 2015, the VHD has been instrumental in initiating and then developing the 4Memory consortium.

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

Task Area 5: Data Culture

Type

Scholarly and Research Institution

Co-Spokesperson

Since 1950, the HI has functioned as an institution that combines research on East Central Europe with the mandate to set up and expand scholarly infrastructures. The core discipline is historical studies, supplemented by further emphases in art history and historical cartography. Its main expertise is on Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Ukraine. Through projects and other activities, the HI generates heterogeneous forms of research data. Furthermore, it brings together worldwide unique collections under one roof: a press-clipping archive (5 million entries), an image archive (750,000 images and born digitals), a map collection (50,000 maps and 10,000 aerial photographs), a musical collection and an additional 1,300 metres of historical documents (the oldest dating back to the 14th century). Such collections are complemented by one of the leading libraries on East European history (650,000 media items). With the founding of a new department for the development of research infrastructures in 2015, the HI made a significant step in the direction of digital knowledge management. Since 2018, the Herder Institute Research Academy (HIRA) has also supported career advancement for young researchers in Russian and East European studies in the humanities throughout Germany by forging links between scientific research and practical qualification perspectives in infrastructures, thus forging new transnational career paths in the digital humanities. From 2021, the Herder-Institute will engage in the implementation of a research infrastructure “Digital and critical documentation of cultural heritage in Eastern Europe”. In close cooperation with external partners, the HI will build up and continuously develop the research infrastructure with four aims: the development of databases and data structures to map the complexity of historical sources; the application and further development of existing standard vocabulary; the analysis of the interrelations between the growing number of digitised sources and the development of new methods and tools (academic software development) in the humanities in transnational contexts. Finally, a particular challenge is mapping historicity and source criticism in technical systems and showing multiple perspectives in metadata structures. Therefore, the research infrastructure will support standardisation, establish interoperability and enable collaborative workflows.

Team

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

Task Area 1: Data Quality

Type

Research Institution

Co-Spokesperson

Prof. Dr. Peter Haslinger

peter.haslinger@herder-institut.de

The Deutsches Museum was founded in 1903, the Deutsches Museum (DM) is the largest museum in Germany and one of the largest in the world devoted to technology and the natural sciences. With its main venue in the city centre of Munich and four branch museums, it attracts approximately 1.5 million visitors per year, with a further 2.5 million visits to its website. The unique collection of exhibits on display is supplemented by interactive experiments, dioramas, films and multimedia systems. DM also has an extensive library and extended archives, as well as the Kerschensteiner College for the advanced training of teachers, students and museum personnel. As an integrated research museum and a member of the Leibniz Association, it conducts research on selected areas of specialisation such as collection-oriented research, the history of science, technology and the environment, conservation sciences and visitor research.
At the DM, digitisation started early on and developed into the institution's most dynamic and fastest growing area. The Deutsches Museum Digital, a digital twin of the classical museum, combines extended digitisation of the collections with cutting-edge research in the field of digital humanities. Practical tools such as the VRLab – a Virtual Reality hub to experiment with innovative tools to educate and reflect on digital storytelling – complement digital research and digital information research infrastructures. DM has been central in creating large-scale collaborative digital programs such as the DFG-funded Fachinformationsdienst Geschichtswissenschaft, a specialised information service for Historical Studies, which is run in collaboration with the Bavarian State Library, and KultSam, Cultural Collections as Digital Repositories of Knowledge for Research, Teaching and Public Communication, with the purpose of opening-up the collections for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research by digitising, making accessible and linking various collections.

 

Team

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

Task Area 1: Data Quality

Type

Memory Institution

Co-Spokesperson

The Historical Data Centre of Saxony-Anhalt was founded in 2008 at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg as a permanent institution for subject-specific research data management. While adhering to FAIR principles, the scientific data centre provides interdisciplinary advice on modelling, digitisation, analysis, publication and re-use of primarily humanities data. As an innovative scientific institution for shaping digital change, the Data Centre develops concepts and guidelines for subject-specific data management. These include processes such as data curation, authorship and documentation and ensuring data quality. The Data Centre consults on research projects and supports researchers as a data publisher through data curation, data enrichment (authority data) and publication in the subject-specific repositories of GLAM institutions. MLU-Hist-Data cooperates with the University and State Library of Saxony-Anhalt in expanding the certified data repository shared_it: 17,479 historical data sets have been contributed, though data protection law currently prevents direct access to most of them. A portal (https://bolsa.uni-halle.de/) was opened in spring 2020 for such sensitive data to ensure publication via metadata, and further oral history holdings are currently being integrated.
The Data Centre is an innovator in the area of personal entities (interviews, biographies, life history data, images, genealogical mass data, etc.). It has developed the "Ontology of Historical, German-language Office and Occupational Names (OhdAB)", a taxonomy for the analysis of historical occupations compatible to international standards (PST, HISCO, KldB2010, GND), and it is part of several interdisciplinary and international networks (ENCHOS, HISCO, History for Data, ICARUS) to develop cross-disciplinary standards and digital analysis tools. At the same time, further subject-related vocabularies for text mining and the quality-assured, automated contextualisation and analysis of structured and unstructured data (e.g. personal and location data, time data, causes of death, kinship relations, etc.) are being developed. In this way, Hist-Data coordinates entity specific work processes (e.g. geo-data and personal data) in direct cooperation with communities of citizien sciences such as the Verein für Computergenealogie or the Landesheimatbund Sachsen-Anhalt, up to internationally networked science and GLAM infrastructures.
The data centre has itself organised or coordinated historical mass data recordings with the help of digital tools and accompanies larger networks (such as the Association for Computergenealogy) with workshops, conferences or forms of data curation. The Data Centre also has expertise in the retro-digitisation of old data and their scientific recoding and re-use. The data centre participates actively and partly coordinating in general and subject-specific networks of data management and science (Competence Network nestor, Research Data Alliance (RDA), Digital Humanties in German-speaking countries: AG Datenzentren, History for Data, Association of German Historians: AG Digitale Geschichtswissenschaft, Historical Commission Saxony-Anhalt).

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

TA 2: Data Connectivity

Type

Research Institution

Co-Spokesperson

The IEG in Mainz is an independent research institute. Since its foundation in 1950, it has conducted research on European history, built up an extensive global network of scholars and established a library and information infrastructure containing analogue and digital material on topics across centuries of European history. In 2012, the Institute’s dynamic development led to its induction into the Leibniz Association. Successful grant applications to funding bodies such as the German Research Foundation (DFG), Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Volkswagen Foundation, Leibniz Association (Leibniz Competition) and the European Commission (Horizon 2020) have supported the Institute’s scholarly work and given it substantial experience in steering collaborative research projects and administering funds.The IEG’S staff includes some 40 researchers working in the fields of the history of European societies, cultures, and politics; European international and transnational relations within and beyond the continent; and European religious history, including Judaism and Islam. Its scholarship programme for PhD, Postdoc and Senior Research Fellows has  brought some 1,500 scholars to Mainz for extended residential research stays. Its  library offers approximately 90,000 printed titles and 900,000 licensed online resources on European history from the mid-15th century, with emphasis on general and international history, as well as on church history and the history of theology since Renaissance and the Reformation. The IEG has been a pioneer in digital history, particularly with regard to geo-humanities – leading to a widely used collection of digital historical maps – and innovative open-access publishing, providing high-value resources aimed at broad audiences, such as European History Online (EGO) and IEG Maps. It attracted additional permanent funding in 2019 for a Digital Historical Research Unit | DH Lab embedded in its research programme. This division combines developing digital methods and conducting digitally enhanced research, actively shaping the digital transformation of historical research. Within the DH Lab, individual projects are carried out, new ideas for DH are conceived, research collections are curated, software is developed (ConedaKOR) and new concepts of data literacy (including RDM) are designed. The DH Lab is also involved in numerous national and international networks, projects and consortia on digital research infrastructures.

 

Team

Role

Applicant

Responsibility

TA 6 Participation and Steering

Type

Research Institution

Spokesperson

Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (h_da) is one of the largest universities of applied sciences (HAW) in Germany. Founded in 1971, it offers over 60 study programmes in the fields of arts and sciences for around 16,000 students. Applied research and development play a key role at the h_da. The h_da is one of the few universities of applied sciences in Germany with the independent right to award doctorates in its strong research areas of sustainability sciences, applied computer science and social work. The right to award doctorates is exercised in specially established doctoral centers, which serve as a platform for bundling the university’s particular research strengths.

The Institute for Communication and Media (ikum) was founded in 2015 in the Media Department of the h_da. The ikum brings together several different research projects, such as those on the use of digital research data in the arts and humanities, on questions of the digitisation of cultural heritage and in the fields of digital humanities, digital scholarly editions, and data literacy more generally. These research perspectives are addressed primarily from an information and library-science perspective. The members of ikum are active in a variety of national and international professional associations and organisations such as KIBA and IFLA. The h_da is also involved in several national research infrastructures, e.g. in the humanities-oriented consortia DARIAH-DE and NFDI4Culture as well as, from an engineering perspective, in NFDI4Ing. The topic of building up research data infrastructures is especially central to its interests, as the h_da, along with all other Hessian universities and universities of applied sciences, is involved in the state-wide research-data initiative HeFDI. Within this framework, in addition to the development of digital services for research data management, further education and training courses in the field of data literacy are being established. This field is located at the transdisciplinary interface between engineering and the humanities on the one hand and information-, computer- and library science on the other. Also within the framework of HeFDI, a long-term archiving architecture is being established to store local repository research data cross-locationally and with persistent referencing.

Team

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

TA 4 Data Literacy

Type

Scholarly and Research Institution

Co-Spokesperson

Prof. Dr. Stefan Schmunk

stefan.schmunk@h-da.de

Website

Profile Web Page

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is one of the largest European universal libraries and of world renown as an international research library and heritage institution. It forms part of Germany's virtual national library and is the central state library and repository library of the Free State of Bavaria. Its total holdings amount to around 34 million items,among these almost 10.9 million books, over 54,000 current periodicals in electronic and printed form, 17 million photographs/images and 140,000 manuscripts. Every year approximately 125,000 volumes are added to its collections. Furthermore, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek holds the largest digital data stock of all German libraries with more than 2.5 million digitised works, around 960 million image files or a memory space of one petabyte. Around 70 percent of its copyright-free holdings are freely accessible on the Internet. Besides the professional digitisation of manuscripts, books, newspaper issues and special materials, the library’s own Munich Digitisation Center (MDZ) develops software and research tools, for example “image-based similarity search”, the newspaper portal “digiPress” or the standard “International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)”. In addition, the MDZ secures the contents for future generations by long-term archiving.

The Library’s other sophisticated digital services include four Specialised Information Services (Classics, Historical Studies; Russian, East and Southeast European Studies; Musicology). Furthermore, it operates bavarikon, the internet portal of the Free State of Bavaria for the presentation of art, culture and stocks of knowledge from Bavarian institutions. Moreover, one of the Staatsbibliothek’s departments is the Head Office of the Bavarian Library Network. It is the regional service and competence center for all the library network’s members. Its responsibilities include the development, provision and support of high-performance library applications, competent counselling and support regarding essential questions of information technology and innovative solutions.

 

Team

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

Task Area 2: Data Connectivity

Type

Memory Institution

Co-Spokesperson

FIZ Karlsruhe makes significant contributions to the information infrastructure by supporting researchers in science, the humanities and industry worldwide. FIZ Karlsruhe curates and indexes large amounts of patent information and research data from various sources. Nearly 300 employees develop and operate innovative information services and e-research solutions for precise research and intelligent analysis of these data. FIZ Karlsruhe conducts applied research in close collaboration with academic and research organisations and acts as an experienced partner in national and European research projects. FIZ Karlsruhe is engaged in several high-level working groups and committees that address information infrastructure and digital preservation issues in national and international contexts. The department e-Research (IEE), led by Matthias Razum, focusses on research data management, digital long-term archiving and virtual research environments. With a strong background in software engineering, it has participated in or led projects like National Hosting of Electronic Resources, RADAR (research data repository), German Newspaper Portal, TOPORAZ (digital space-time model for networked research) and Time Machine Europe. It oversees the operation and software development of the German Digital Library (DBB) and German Archives Portal. IEE brings extensive experience with software development in the humanities and services such as RADAR to the consortium. The research department Information Service Engineering (ISE), led by Prof. Harald Sack, covers semantic technologies, knowledge discovery, ontological engineering and exploratory search. ISE brings profound experience with the design, implementation and exploitation of ontologies, knowledge graphs and linked data to the consortium. Intellectual property rights in distributed information infrastructures (IGR), led by Prof. Franziska Boehm, deals with copyright, IT (security) and data protection law on a German and EU level. Compliance with data protection and copyright laws are important to the NFDI4Memory community when it comes to the collection, storage and re-use of research data.

Role

Co-Applicant

Responsibility

TA 3 Data Services

Type

Infrastructure Institution

Co-Spokesperson