DASCH: Data and Service Center for the Humanities

Abstract

Research data in the humanities needs to be sustainable, and access to digital resources must be possible over a long period. Only if these prerequisites are fulfilled can research data be used as a source for other projects. In addition, reliability is a fundamental requirement so that digital sources can be cited, reused, and quoted. To address this problem, we present our solution: the Data and Service Center for the Humanities located in Switzerland. The centralized infrastructure is based on flexible and extendable software that is in turn reliant on modern technologies. Such an approach allows for the straightforward migration of existing research project databases with limited life spans in the humanities. We will demonstrate the basic concepts behind this proposed solution and our first experiences in the application thereof.

Maintaining Repositories, Databases, and Digital Collections in Memory Institutions: An Integrative Review

“…Two papers took a broad look at both migration and maintenance (Stigler & Steiner, 2018; Thomer & Twidale, 2014). And finally, 11 papers discuss migration as a background or tangential concern (Breeding, 2002; Brush & Jiras, 2019; Byrne, 2014; Gentry et al, 2021; Kansa, 2005; Kipnis MSI et al, 2019; Knight‐Davis et al, 2015; Liu & Zhou, 2011; Rieh et al, 2008; Rosenthaler et al, 2015; Yin et al, 2020). …”

Gravsearch: Transforming SPARQL to query humanities data

“…Gravsearch has been developed as part of Knora (Knowledge Organization, Representation, and Annotation), an application developed by the Data and Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH) [22] to ensure the long-term availability and reusability of research data in the humanities. 3 The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) requires researchers to have a plan for making their research data publicly accessible, 4 and the DaSCH was created to provide the necessary infrastructure to meet this requirement.…”

“…Here were are looking for a text containing the word Acta that is marked up as a bibliographical reference. 22 Knora can store text markup as 'standoff markup': each markup tag is represented as an entity in the triplestore, with start and end positions referring to a substring in the text. This makes it straightforward to represent non-hierarchical structures in markup, 23 and makes it possible for queries to combine criteria referring to text markup with criteria referring to other entities in the triplestore, including links within text markup that point to RDF resources outside the text.…”

“…This makes it straightforward to represent non-hierarchical structures in markup, 23 and makes it possible for queries to combine criteria referring to text markup with criteria referring to other entities in the triplestore, including links within text markup that point to RDF resources outside the text. Projects may define own standoff entities in their 22 Gravsearch translates this FILTER into two operations:…”

Different Preservation Levels: The Case of Scholarly Digital Editions

“…The establishment of humanities data centres as a collaboration between well established infrastructure providers and digital humanists is one possible approach to ensure a trustworthy long term preservation. Examples are the HDC (Buddenbohm, Engelhardt & Wuttke 2016), the Data Center for the Humanities (DCH) Cologne (Sahle & Kronenwett 2016), the Data and Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH) (Rosenthaler, Fornaro & Clivaz 2015) and the Kompetenznetzwerk Digitale Edition (KONDE, 2018). Key to the success of such infrastructures is the relevance to the research community of the services provided.…”