The TextGrid research group, a consortium of 10 research institutions in Germany, is developing a virtual research environment for researchers in the arts and humanities that provides services and tools for the analysis of text data and supports the curation of research data by means of grid technology. The TextGrid virtual research environment consists of two main components: the TextGrid Laboratory (TextGridLab), which serves as the entry point to the virtual research environment, and the TextGrid Repository (TextGridRep), which is a long-term humanities data archive ensuring sustainability, interoperability and long-term access to research data. To support all stages of the research lifecycle, preserve and maintain research data, and ensure its long-term usefulness, existing research practices must be supported. Therefore the TextGridLab provides common functionalities in a sustainable environment to intensify re-use of data, tools, and services, and the TextGridRep enables researchers to publish and share their data in a way that supports long-term availability and re-usability.
International audienceIn recent years, a variety of initiatives have been funded with the aim of producing software tools or environments of a type variously known as virtual research environments, research infrastructures, or cyberinfrastructures. These initiatives vary in their scale, specialization, scope, and level of funding. One issue that they face in common, however, is that of sustainability: how can the continued--and useful--existence of a system or tool be guaranteed, or at least facilitated, once a project's funding has been spent? In this paper, we examine how such sustainability has been enabled, in the particular case of infrastructures for textual scholarship, in the context of three international projects: TextGrid,1 TEXTvre,2 and DARIAH3. Firstly, we will address the inter-project collaboration and crossfertilization between TextGrid and TEXTvre, including architectural decisions and shared data infrastructures, and investigate how the projects benefited from the exchange. We will then discuss how this existing collaboration can be taken forward by the loosely-coupled and distributed framework being developed by the DARIAH community, and how it can serve as a model for the sort of collaborations that DARIAH plans to enable
Conflict of interest: MDR is a founder of TRex Bio and Sitryx and receives research funding from AbbVie. MML receives research funding from AbbVie. HBN has received consulting fees from Johnson & Johnson and 23andMe, has served on an advisory board for Boehringer Ingelheim, and is a board member of the Hidradenitis Suppurativa Foundation. WL receives research funding from AbbVie, Amgen, Janssen, Novartis, Regeneron, Sanofi, and TRex Bio.
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