The project HDC is producing a design study for a data centre that will manage the long-term accessibility and continuing usability of humanities research data

To be able to make digital research data available for the scholarly community in the long term, a balance needs to be struck between the satisfactory representation of the digital results and of their source material in a long-term archive, on the one hand, and the sustainable operation of the research data centre, with its preconditions of standardisation and scalability, on the other. Against this background the HDC is evaluating, in particular, current types of research data such as networked databases and visualisations. The use of these complex data types is already widespread and is steadily growing in Digital Humanities. The experience of the scholarly and scientific partners collaborating in the HDC shows that this demands a special combination of technical and scholarly expertise right from the start of a project’s design through to its handover to a research data centre.

The collaborating academic partners – the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities , two Max Planck Institutes and the BBAW – together with two computing centres, the Zuse Institut Berlin (ZIB) and the GWDG in Göttingen, who are directing the project, are developing technical designs and prototypes, as well as models for operation and funding. In addition the project profits from the many years’ experience of TELOTA, from networks like ifDHberlin and cooperations with the services provided by infrastructure projects like DARIAH-DE.
 

The Academy research project “Humanities Data Centre - a Research Data Centre for the Humanities” is part of the Academies' Programme , a research funding programme co-financed by the German federal government and individual federal states. Coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities , the Programme intends to retrieve and explore our cultural heritage, to make it accessible and highlight its relevance to the present, as well as to preserve it for the future.