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This article describes how virtual research environments (VREs) offer new opportunities for researchers to analyse open data and to obtain new insights for policy making. Although various VRE-related initiatives are under development, there is a lack of insight into how VREs support collaborative open data analysis by researchers and how this might be improved, ultimately leading to input for policy making to solve societal issues. This article clarifies in which ways VREs support researchers in open data analysis. Seven cases presenting different modes of researcher support for open data analysis were investigated and compared. Four types of support were identified: 1) ‘Figure it out yourself', 2) ‘Leading users by the hand', 3) ‘Training to provide the basics' and 4) ‘Learning from peers'. The author provides recommendations to improve the support of researchers' open data analysis and to subsequently obtain new insights for policy making to solve societal challenges.

International audience

Public and private organizations increasingly release their data to gain benefits such as transparency and economic growth. The use of these open data can be supported and stimulated by providing considerable metadata (data about the data), including discovery, contextual and detailed metadata. In this paper we argue that metadata are key enablers for the effective use of Linked Open Data (LOD). We illustrate the potential of metadata by 1) presenting an overview of advantages and disadvantages of metadata derived from literature, 2) presenting metadata requirements for LOD architectures derived from literature, workshops and a questionnaire, 3) describing a LOD metadata architecture that meets the requirements and 4) showing examples of the application of this architecture in the ENGAGE project. The paper shows that using metadata with the appropriate metadata architecture can yield considerable benefits for LOD publication and use, including improving find ability, accessibility, storing, preservation, analysing, comparing, reproducing, finding inconsistencies, correct interpretation, visualizing, linking data, assessing and ranking the quality of data and avoiding unnecessary duplication of data. The Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) can be used to build the metadata architecture and achieve the advantages.

In this chapter I will describe what the CLARIN infrastructure is and how it can be used, with a focus on the Low Countries (and especially the Netherlands) part of the CLARIN infrastructure. I aim to explain how a Humanities researcher can use the CLARIN infrastructure. I describe the basic functionality that CLARIN aims to offer, including searching for data and software, applying software to data, and storing data and software resulting from research.

This article explores the affordances and functionalities of the Dutch CLARIAH research infrastructure – and the integrated video annotation tool – for doing media historical research with digitised audiovisual sources from television archives. The growing importance of digital research infrastructures, archives and tools, has enticed media historians to rethink their research practices more and more in terms of methodological transparency, tool criticism and reflection. Moreover, also questions related to the heuristics and hermeneutics of our scholarly work need to be reconsidered. The article hence sketches the role of digital research infrastructures for the humanities (in the Netherlands), and the use of video annotation in media studies and other research domains. By doing so, the authors reflect on their own specific engagements with the CLARIAH infrastructure and its tools, both as media historians and co-developers. This dual position greatly determines the possibilities and constraints for the various modes of digital scholarship relevant to media history. To exemplify this, two short case studies – based on a pilot project ‘Me and Myself. Tracing First Person in Documentary History in AV-Collections’ (M&M) – show how the authors deployed video annotation to segment interpretative units of interest, rather than opting for units of analysis common in statistical analysis. The deliberate choice to abandon formal modes of moving image annotation and analysis ensued from a delicate interplay between the desired interpretative research goals, and the integration of tool criticism and reflection in the research design. The authors found that due to the formal and stylistic complexity of documentaries, also alternative, hermeneutic research strategies ought to be supported by digital infrastructures and its tools.

In the Netherlands, the archiving and publication of archaeological research data has led to the establishment of the e-Depot for Dutch Archaeology (EDNA) accommodated at DANS. EDNA is a collaboration between DANS and the Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE). DANS is an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The slogan "Digital archaeology requires a digital memory" was used in 2007 to bring care for digital data to the attention of Dutch archaeologists. The e-depot ensures durable archiving and unlocking of all digital documentation of the archaeological research. By 2014, DANS provides online access via EASY to more than 21,500 archaeological datasets: 18,500 reports and 3,000 large datasets consisting of data of excavations and explorations (photos, GIS, data-tables, drawings). Both the research descriptions and all data can be downloaded. Agreements to this end have been laid down in the quality standard for Dutch archaeology. DANS ensures that access to digital research data keeps improving, through its services and by taking part in national and international projects and networks. By participating in projects such as Odyssee, CARARE, ARIADNE and DARIAH, the options for finding, accessing and re-using archaeological and other data are continuously improving. DANS stimulates cooperation between data producers and users and does research into long-term accessibility. The existing infrastructure of the e-depot for Dutch Archaeology allows for sharing of good practices such as long-term preservation, data organisation and data dissemination for accessibility.

This paper explores key issues in the development of open access to research data. The use of digital means for developing, storing and manipulating data is creating a focus on ‘data-driven science’. One aspect of this focus is the development of ‘open access’ to research data. Open access to research data refers to the way in which various types of data are openly available to public and private stakeholders, user communities and citizens. Open access to research data, however, involves more than simply providing easier and wider access to data for potential user groups. The development of open access requires attention to the ways data are considered in different areas of research. We identify how open access is being unevenly developed across the research environment and the consequences this has in terms of generating data gaps. Data gaps refer to the way data becomes detached from published conclusions. To address these issues, we examine four main areas in developing open access to research data: stakeholder roles and values; technological requirements for managing and sharing data; legal and ethical regulations and procedures; institutional roles and policy frameworks. We conclude that problems of variability and consistency across the open access ecosystem need to be addressed within and between these areas to ensure that risks surrounding a data gap are managed in open access. 11 authors. Missing: Sally Wyatt

This article has been accepted for publication by EUP in the IJHAC: International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing (https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/ijhac); International audience; Since the first ESFRI roadmap in 2006, multiple humanities Research Infrastructures (RIs) have been set up all over the European continent, supporting archaeologists (ARIADNE), linguists (CLARIN-ERIC), Holocaust researchers (EHRI), cultural heritage specialists (IPERION-CH) and others. These examples only scratch the surface of the breadth of research communities that have benefited from close cooperation in the European Research Area.While each field developed discipline-specific services over the years, common themes can also be distinguished. All humanities RIs address, in varying degrees, questions around research data management, the use of standards and the desired interoperability of data across disciplinary boundaries.This article sheds light on how cluster project PARTHENOS developed pooled services and shared solutions for its audience of humanities researchers, RI managers and policymakers. In a time where the convergence of existing infrastructure is becoming ever more important – with the construction of a European Open Science Cloud as an audacious, ultimate goal – we hope that our experiences inform future work and provide inspiration on how to exploit synergies in interdisciplinary, transnational, scientific cooperation.