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Reporting on RDA Digital Humanities Outreach Efforts

ANDS Webinar 29/30 July 2015Bridget Almas, Tufts University

@resdatall, @BridgetAlmas

2What is RDA

▪Global initiative with 3000+ members from 100+ countries

▪Aims to build the social and technical bridges to enable open sharing of data

▪RDA vision is researchers and innovators openly sharing data across technologies, disciplines and countries to address the grand challenges of society

3What is RDA hoping to produce?

▪Social Infrastructure Global forum for communication and collaboration Wide interdisciplinary community of experts working

together to identify problems and build solutions▪Technical Infrastructure

Investigating, documenting and leveraging existing solutions

Building new solutions to fill the gaps

Fran Berman, Research Data Alliance

Needed infrastructure: Both technical and social underpinnings needed to support data sharing

Systems Interoperability

Adopted Policy

Sustainable Economics

Common Types, Standards, Metadata

Traffic Image: Mike Gonzalez

Adopted Community Practice

Training, Education, Workforce

Fran Berman, Research Data Alliance

Prioritizing Infrastructure for Effort and Investment Challenging

Barriers to data sharing / collaboration•Difficult when professional cultures are unsupportive•Funding often limited (and likely collaborators often compete)•Lack of incentives•Lack of enabling environments•Lack of infrastructure

Stephanie A. Miner, the Syracuse mayor, said [infrastructure is] too often overlooked when politicians want to

spend money on economic development. “You don’t cut ribbons for new water

mains, but that’s really what matters.”

NY Times, Feburary 15, 2014

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▪ Raise awareness within the (mostly scientific) RDA community of the relevance of humanities use cases▪ Raise awareness within the DH community of the activities of RDA and how they might be relevant to humanists' data needs (we do have data)▪ Increase engagement by humanists in designing, developing and adopting interdisciplinary solutions for data sharing

Motivations and Objectives for DH Outreach

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▪ Ability to reach wider audiences

▪ Promise of having work sustained beyond the life of a single project

▪ Progressively better use of $$ Less to redevelopment of infrastructure, more to

scholarly research

What are the incentives?

8Realizing potential of RDA: What we make of it

▪ Depends upon engagement and if/how we leverage the community

▪ Working group structure and focus on producing adoptable outputs is essential to driving to real solutions and not just talk

▪ Offers an opportunity to look outside the usual list of suspects for collaborators and build sustainable solutions

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▪March 2015: Humanities Panel at RDA Plenary 5 in San Diego

▪May 2015: Workshop at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

▪July 2015: Meetup at DH 2015 in Sydney

Recent Activities

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▪ What is different about digital humanities infrastructure? Can it be described in terms of use cases?

▪Are there specific RDA products or recommendations that digital humanities projects can adopt now? If not why? Are the requirements and data models different?

Humanities Panel at P5: Questions

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▪Peter Wittenberg, Max Plank Data and Compute Center, Germany▪Nigel Ward, National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources, Australia▪Ted Hewitt, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada▪Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA▪Sandra Collins, Digital Repository of Ireland▪Bridget Almas, Perseus Digital Library, USA

Humanities Panel at P5: Participants

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▪ Core infrastructure Needs ...

Persistent Identifiers, Data Type Registries, Metadata Standards, Identity, Access and Authentication, etc.

.. and challenges Redundancy, lack of long-term commitment, lack of

recognition, incentive and support

Humanities Panel at P5: What is the Same?

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▪ Nuances Data formats Copyright and access complexities Semantics and understanding of what “data” means Cultural and language complexities Research methods – nonlinear and recursive Very traditional reward models

Humanities Panel at P5: What is different?

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▪ From within RDA the case for involvement of humanities seems clear

▪ A bit of preaching to the choir – we need to do outreach to engage the humanists in RDA activities

▪And we need to find ways to enable and incentivize work within the context of RDA

Humanities Panel at P5: Key Takeaways

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▪ RDA Objective: to learn more about the disciplinary needs of digital humanists with regard to data infrastructure and data sharing ▪ Participants were invited to share use cases for infrastructure▪ RDA/US leadership presented RDA structure and outcomes to date▪ Round table discussion▪ Reaction from funders

Baltimore Workshop: Objectives and Format

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▪ Hosted by Johns Hopkins University and RDA/US▪ RDA/US Leadership▪ US Funders of Humanities: NEH, IMLS, Mellon Foundation▪Projects/Participants: California Digital Library, DARIAH, Hathi Trust, Homer Multitext, JHU Press, LACE, Open Philology, PECE, Perseids, Pleiades Gazetteer, Roman de la Rose

Baltimore Workshop: Participants

17Baltimore Workshop: Relevance of RDA Outcomes

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▪Collaboration is often difficult because humanities projects and funding are often invested in nationalistic or localized pursuits

▪ Identify “Grand Challenges” that could serve as unifying issues to spur collaboration. E.g.

Interoperability of Linked Data Plurality of languages found in the data

Baltimore Workshop: Key Discussion Points

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▪ RDA working group structures should account for needs of DH where infrastructure may already exist but must be generalized for wider use

▪ RDA needs to make its value proposition to humanists more clear – communication is a challenge here

▪ Training is essential to engage humanists

Baltimore Workshop: Key Discussion Points (cont'd)

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▪RDA has a potential to prevent the “reinvention of the wheel” syndrome

▪ Projects could look to take advantage of RDA's role as an interdisciplinary global authority providing guidance and stamp of approval

E.g. leveraging RDA working group structure to ensure projects are producing/using sustainable solutions

Baltimore Workshop: Funder Feedback

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▪RDA needs to help tackle data publishing and copyright challenges

▪Preservation needs could serve as a unifying factor for DH projects.

Libraries have an important role to play here, as well as in providing training

Baltimore Workshop: Funder Feedback (cont'd)

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▪Informal lunch-time gathering (10-15 attendees)▪Most participants had not heard of RDA before▪Researchers do not yet have a clear view of how their work benefits RDA and vice-versa▪All agreed on importance of infrastructure and need for humanist researches to be engaged in defining problems and solutions▪Participants were encouraged to sign up, join working and interest groups▪ADHO will investigate ways to collaborate with RDA

DH 2015 Meetup

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▪ It's up to the community to engage - humanities researchers need to begin to participate in working and interest groups▪ For funding, maybe a bit of a chicken and egg scenario – want the activity funded but need to start to prove its value

What next?

24How to get involved?

▪ Signup at http://rd-alliance.org/ - it's free!▪ Explore existing/relevant RDA/Humanities activity

Baltimore workshop report http://bit.ly/1LhU91h Digital Practices in History and Ethnography IG

http://bit.ly/1NwUEUz PID Collections WG http://bit.ly/1ezRdjf Data Fabric IG http://bit.ly/1Ky6G1F

▪ Add your use cases▪ Start or join an interest or working group▪ Nominate yourself or colleague for TAB

25Questions?