0.31 European elephants in the room (are they the ones with the  (Page 8/9)

The DHO and TGE Adonis exist against the backdrop of the development of European-wide infrastructures in the humanities. The European Science Foundation has a Forum on Research Infrastructures. Its standing committee in the humanities recently agreed to publish a policy document on humanities infrastructure, particularly digital infrastructures, which could mean additional funding streams. More important, perhaps, are DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure). DARIAH and CLARIN are on what is known as the ESFRI Roadmap, which lists Research Infrastructures of pan-European interest that are being developed to meet the long-term needs of European research communities, covering all research areas across the entire Union. These infrastructures have at their core a commitment to enhance science and technology development at the international level, to support new ways of doing research in Europe, and to contribute to the growth of the European Research Area.

DARIAH and CLARIN are now in what is known as their preparatory phase and are seeking funding for the construction phase. DARIAH aligns itself probably more closely with traditional digital humanities, with a mission to enhance and support digitally-enabled research across the humanities and arts. It will do this by developing and maintaining an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices, from training to resource development to content management, delivery, and curation. Funding for these pan-European infrastructures are fairly complicated, with national funding agencies allocating monies to particular research infrastructures on the ESFRI Roadmap. If a country chooses not to support a particular infrastructure, then individuals and institutions from that country cannot take a primary role in its execution and development. Moreover, for countries to take a leadership role in an infrastructure on the ESFRI Roadmap, they must already have expertise in the area, with a reliable and stable national infrastructure. 

Thus there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation: countries must have the economic will at both the national and European level to commit to an infrastructure. They must have a credible national presence to be part of a European presence that will, no doubt, bring additional monies back to participating countries. Both Ireland and France have committed to DARIAH's next phase, thus making their national infrastructures (the DHO and TGE Adonis) crucial. But what if these were to fail? Clearly the soap opera of national/supernational infrastructural approaches to sustainability will be running on for some years yet.

Editorial models: reuse and intellectual property

Our inability to enable trust in digital resources is one of the major stumbling blocks to the reform of scholarly communications we wrote of earlier in this paper. But there are many other cultural barriers in place as well. Our attachment to our norms of scholarly communication is also a limitation, but it is also a part of who we are as scholars.  In many humanists’ eyes, the monograph is still the primary acceptable mode of discourse between scholars, with articles and book chapters coming in second, and very little else on the list.  Are we too locked-in to the hegemony of the .pdf, to creating not just authoritative virtual copies of our heritage documents and artifacts, but of our entire communications system as well?