Research Data Management for Arts and Humanities: Integrating Voices of the Community

The idea behind the DARIAH Research Data Management Working Group is to tackle the challenges associated with the implementation of new FAIR and open data sharing mandates, and offer a unique space for collaboration among representatives of all major arts and humanities disciplines, cultural heritage professionals, and data management experts. More specifically, we are building a knowledge hub for new professionals around data management support (data managers, data stewards, open science officers, subject librarians etc.) from across DARIAH’s national hubs to exchange across the discipline-specific dimension.

During our meetings, the conflict between the need for and emergence of new data support roles, and the lack of any established domain-specific curriculum to train them, or, in some cases, even a lack of established good practices, became a recurrent topic which we aimed to address. Instead of embarking on the giant endeavour of curating an exhaustive and authoritative textbook for research data support specialists who work in the arts and humanities field, our idea is to give a snapshot of our own activities in the field and highlight the valuable work of others. Accordingly, the present publication can be read as the written form of a roundtable (or town hall) discussion where experts from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain have come and sat together to report and discuss past or ongoing work, share their fields of interests and provide honest and critical reflections, reveal how their institutions have developed capacities for data support, share their own stories of becoming data support professionals in the domain, and, most importantly, explore together what solutions, tools, practices, and other resources could be used and could be generalised across borders and disciplines.

This publication is the result of the Working Group’s first writing sprint, held between the 23 and 24 June 2022 at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN), in the Staszic Palace. The event was made possible by the DARIAH third Working Groups’ (WG) Funding Scheme Call for the years 2021–2023 and the resulting grant, which was administered by the Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN).