DARIAH Theme 2016-2017: Public Humanities Call The DARIAH

 DARIAH Theme 2016-2017: Public Humanities Call
The DARIAH Theme is a series of activities and events related to an annual thematic priority
set by the Board of Directors. For our second theme for 2016, we have selected ‘Public
humanities’. The first theme in 2015 had the theme ‘Open Humanities’ and funded 6 smallscale collaborations in the domain.
Background
The DARIAH infrastructure is a platform to bring digital arts and humanities initiatives in
Europe together using open standards and policies. The high level goal of DARIAH is to
create a platform to launch digital humanities in all regions of the European Research Area.
DARIAH supports the position of the European Research Area in the critical new research
discipline of digital humanities. We can only speculate as to the effect of massive digitization
efforts on future arts and humanities research. However, uptake of the kind of methodologies
and technologies that would help exploit them for better and new research is still limited. A
cornerstone of DARIAH’s work is to help its members to establish best practices on how to
start and foster their own digital arts and humanities research. We are committed to support
any digitally non-mature research and establish links to the shared DARIAH body of
knowledge. In fact, the development of true trans-European state-of-the-art digital arts and
humanities research area will be one of the immediate impacts of DARIAH.
This theme targets the impact of DARIAH work on the public. We define ‘public humanities’
as the activities of any cultural institution that engages the public with arts and humanities
research and thus adds to the public’s well-being. The public either refers to the general
public or specific organisations such as media or educational institutions, such as schools.
To further develop its work with the public, DARIAH will run a conference in 2017 that will
investigate public value-creation in the creative and cultural industries through digital
transformation from a European perspective. We will make use of the fact that in 2017
Aarhus, where the coordinator of the Danish national DARIAH membership sits, will be the
European Capital of Culture. Participants in this call will be expected to present the results of
their work at this conference.
As an open infrastructure, DARIAH is committed to making research more accessible to the
general public and demonstrate the continued importance of arts and humanities work for
cultural, social and political life in Europe. The humanities, and the understanding and skills
involved in humanities research, will play an important role in how the cultural but also other
online spaces are developing – for example, Steve Jobs saw computer science also as a
1 liberal art, Google looks for graduates with Humanities PhDs, etc. This knowledge has,
however, not reached the wider public yet. By making and crucially sustaining links with the
relevant cultural and digital industries, DARIAH will contribute to demonstrating how
traditional humanities skills will play an important role in the digital age. Whereas DARIAH
has managed to gain institutional recognition at European and national levels, it is its
capacity to relate to its complex community that will be a real measure of its success.
Proposals
We would now like to invite proposals from our DARIAH Institutions to organise events to
explore this public humanities theme and related topics. We have earmarked €45,000 for this
DARIAH Theme and expect to support 3-4 initiatives. Grant holders will be expected to
present the results of their work at the DARIAH Impact conference in 2017 in Aarhus,
Denmark. They are also required to write an entry about their projects on the DARIAH blog.
The Theme events could either be a larger conference and/or a series of workshops or more
interactive events such as hackathons. We would expect that all theme-related activities
involve more than one DARIAH Member and at least one outside organisation.
Please submit 1-2 pages providing us with:
• The topic your Theme activity would like to explore
• The background and relationship to existing or future DARIAH work
• A brief description of the kind of events that you would like to run
• The main partner and budget holding institution from the DARIAH network
Furthermore, we expect an outline of the costs of not more than one page. It is possible to
charge small amounts of administrative support for the work but the majority of costs should
be non-staff and fund the Theme events.
The deadline for submissions will be Thursday, 31 March. Please submit to [email protected].
Notification of successful applications will be made at the end of April, with projects to start
no later than July.
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