Next Phase Clariah Organisation

During the closing symposium of the CLARIAH-Plus project last June, it was announced that we are setting up a permanent CLARIAH-NL organisation to oversee the development and sustainability of the Dutch national infrastructure for digital humanities research. During the past decades we have been collaborating on the CLARIAH infrastructure by means of several consecutive projects funded by Large Scale Research Infrastructure grants from NWO. From September 2024 onwards, the CLARIAH-NL organisation will oversee the further development of the Dutch national infrastructure for the Humanities.

Developing a national infrastructure for digital humanities research

In the three consecutive CLARIAH projects (SEED, CORE, and PLUS), various steps have been taken to develop components of the CLARIAH infrastructure. An overview of the available tools and data resulting from these projects may be found at https://www.ineo.tools/. The INEO portal allows researchers to search, browse, and select digital resources for their research. In addition, various other digital research infrastructure components have been developed, including those financed by PDI-SSH (e.g., Pure3D, Twi-XL, and SANE). The tools and datasets that have been developed are successfully being used by researchers, and they require permanent and sustainable maintenance that extends beyond the timeframe of a temporally limited project. Furthermore, the aim is to expand the userbase of the infrastructure to the entire community of Humanities researchers in the Netherlands as well as researchers from other domains that can benefit from the CLARIAH resources. as well as researchers from other domains that can benefit from the CLARIAH resources.

CLARIAH-NL organisation

To make this possible, the CLARIAH-NL organisation has now formally been founded. The aim of this organisation is to coordinate, develop and manage a sustainable, distributed and shared digital research infrastructure for the Humanities at the national level. This will enable researchers from the humanities and other domains to support their digital research needs.

The importance of the joint research infrastructure curated by CLARIAH-NL is underlined by support from the deans of the Dutch Faculties of Humanities, who see CLARIAH-NL as the main digital infrastructure for Humanities research in the Netherlands. The Dutch Digital Heritage Network also expressed their support for the CLARIAH-NL organisation in order to make digital heritage collections accessible and usable for academic research.

Next steps

As a first step, a Supervisory Board has been installed that represents all parties involved. The board consists of three members representing the humanities faculties, appointed by the Council of Deans in Arts and Humanities: Prof. Dr. Julia Noordegraaf (chair of the Supervisory Board), prof. dr. Gijsbert Rutten, and prof. Dr. Hugo Quené. Prof. Dr Dirk van Miert represents KNAW and NWO research institutes, Dr Henk van den Heuvel represents European Research Infrastructures DARIAH-EU and CLARIN ERIC, and Dr Martijn Kleppe represents the Dutch Digital Heritage Network.

Among the first tasks of this Supervisory Board is setting up a Memorandum of Understanding that outlines the mission, governance, finances, and tasks of the CLARIAH-NL organisation, which will be signed by all parties involved. The Supervisory Board will also install a Management Board that will take care of the day-to-day business of the CLARIAH-NL infrastructure, in alignment with activities in current projects such as SSHOC-NL, the various PDI-SSH projects, as well as future projects.

Stay up to date

If you would like to be updated on the progress of the CLARIAH-NL organisation, please keep an eye on this website, which will soon be modified to represent the new CLARIAH-NL entity.