Digital Humanities Observatory, Royal Irish Academy

Tanya Clement

May 11, 2011

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Susan Schreibman, Director

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 The Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) is an all-island digital humanities collaboratory working with Humanities Serving Irish Society (HSIS), national, European, and international partners to further e-scholarship. The mission of this national collaboration is to serve three ends: 1.) the creation of an infrastructure (DHO) to be managed by the Royal Irish Academy; 2.) the enhancement of the teaching and learning experience of research students in humanities in Ireland’s Higher Education Institutions by linking it to novel pedagogic actions stemming principally from the work of the DHO; 3.) better coordination of humanities research on the island of Ireland.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 The Royal Irish Academy (RIA) has extensive experience in large-scale collaborative research, and expertise in its dissemination. Its research teams, publications division and library have developed strengths in digital humanities. Using its established position as a policy forum and neutral body, RIA will take central responsibility for planning, operating and managing the DHO to support HSIS research. The DHO deals with all regions on the island of Ireland uniformly in conjunction with HSIS partners.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 The DHO is a knowledge resource providing outreach and education on a broad range of digital humanities topics. It provides data management, curation, and discovery services supporting the long-term access to, and greater exploitation of, digital resources in the creation of new models, methodologies and paradigms for 21st century scholarship. DHO staff are experts in a variety of humanities subject areas.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Director (Staff): Responsible for establishing, servicing and providing leadership for this shared on-line national data service for the humanities, including the coordination of distributed networks and the delivery of a digital data archive that is predicated on establishing and promoting shared standards for digitization and archiving across varying data modalities; manages the recruitment of specialist and support staff and establishes the physical infrastructure; provides both academic and administrative leadership for the DHO and takes the lead in developing partnerships for research and teaching emphasizing technological innovation and new research methodologies; develops a network of national and international partnerships and sources new funding opportunities.

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1. Programme Manager (Staff): Responsible for managing various DHO events, conferences and an annual Summer School; works closely with the DHO Director to ensure the smooth operation of the day-to-day running and administration of the DHO, including making travel and calendar arrangements; coordinates budgetary matters of the DHO; liaises with a broad range of individuals within the Academy as well as Academy partners in co-coordinating the development of the DHO; assists in writing grant and funding proposals.
2. Digital Humanities Specialists (Staff): Promote and support the use of advanced computing techniques as applied to the humanities. This is accomplished primarily through three methods: 1) advanced consultations with partners; 2) developing, coordinating, and teaching seminars, workshops, symposia, and summer school; 3) adopting standards and disseminating information about their usage via documentation, templates, and training materials; bring specific skills to the DHO team such as text encoding, database development, imaging, and audio and moving image expertise; assist in the development of a technical framework to support a shared repository fo research, as well serve as a primary point of contact for projects; assist in development efforts including the preparation of funding applications, as well as promote the work of the DHO via professional activities such as conference presentations, articles, and poster sessions.
3. The Metadata Manager (Staff): promotes and supports the use of advanced computing techniques as applied to the humanities. This will be accomplished primarily through three methods: 1) advanced consultations to with partners; 2) developing, coordinating, and teaching seminars, workshops, symposia, and summer school; 3) adopting standards and disseminating information about their usage via documentation, templates, and training materials; researches, evaluates, and interprets developments in metadata standards to recommend and design appropriate metadata schema to facilitate the use of collections; catalogues materials using a variety of metadata schema; plays a crucial role in the development of a technical framework to support a shared repository for research; assists in development efforts including the preparation of funding applications, as well as promote the work of the DHO via professional activities such as conference presentations, articles, and poster sessions.
4. IT Projects Manager (Staff): Responsible for the provision of technical foresight and project management for a variety of DHO partner projects from various institutions created for inclusion in a federated Fedora Commons Repository; looks after the development, implementation, management and maintenance of web applications, including the Drupal-based DHO portal, research database [DRAPIer], and the Fedora Commons Repository; responsible for the day-to-day management and technical foresight of the IT functions of the DHO including: delivery of network, operational and technical services of the DHO and a certain level of software development for DHO applications.Direct Reports:
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   1. The Web Developer (Staff): develops advanced computing applications to support the humanities; plays a key role in the implementation of a shared digital repository; responsibilities include designing, developing, and maintaining highly interactive web interfaces for digital content creation, repository deposit, content discovery, computational analysis, data visualization, and related humanities research tools; provides development, support, and maintenance of the DHO web site and content management system.
   2. The Software Developer (Staff): specializes in the design and implementation of information systems for Humanities and Social Sciences throughout Ireland using traditional database approaches and heterogeneous systems (e.g. XML-based repositories with third-party search infrastructure); uses data mining to process large datasets and extract patterns using mainly machine learning algorithms (decision trees/forests, neural nets, etc.).