Toma Tasovac, Sally Chambers, Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra (2020). Cultural Heritage Data from a Humanities Research Perspective: A DARIAH Position Paper. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02961317
1. Introduction
Europe faces significant challenges when it comes to the effective and efficient digitisation of our cultural heritage. With over 80% of Europe’s cultural heritage remaining to be digitised (Nauta, van den Heuvel and Teunisse, 2017), there is an urgent need to re-think the European digitisation strategy in order to enable Member States to more effectively work together (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/eu-member-states-sign-cooperate-digitising-cultural-heritage) towards the European Commission’s ambitious, but hardly achievable, target of all European cultural heritage being digitised by 2025. Furthermore, a large proportion of the 10-20% of Europe’s cultural heritage that has already been digitised is rapidly approaching its ‘sell-by’ date. Being ‘first generation’ or ‘legacy’ digitisation, it is no longer of a high enough quality (Hill and Hengchen, 2019) for analysis using advanced digital humanities methods.
DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (https://www.dariah.eu/), enhances and supports digitally enabled research and teaching across the Arts and Humanities. It develops, maintains and operates an infrastructure that sustains researchers in building, analysing and interpreting digital resources. Digital (digitised and born-digital) cultural heritage is fundamental to our research. Cultural Heritage Data is Humanities Research Data. Without digital cultural heritage, undertaking humanities research with digital methods would be impossible. With an estimated 500,000 humanities researchers in Europe alone (Rossi, 2020), the digital Arts and Humanities community represents a significant community to consider in light of the European Commission’s evaluation and possible revision of the Commission
Recommendation of 27 October 2011 on Digitisation and Online Accessibility of Cultural Material and Digital Preservation (REC 2011/711/EU). It is for this reason that we would like to share a few additional reflections from the DARIAH Community in this position paper. […]