Digital Research Infrastructure Research Articles

Low-code and ai-augmented Code for an Archaeological Database: Arkas 2.0

Abstract This data paper presents Arkas 2.0, a national research database and research infrastructure containing data on all archaeological sites and monuments in Slovenia. The new database is a hybrid cloud microservice built on low-code platforms (Caspio and ArcGIS Experience builder) and augmented by generative ai (ChatGPT-3.5). The data paper describes the Arkas 2.0 dataset and how it fits into the research context by discussing the challenges archaeologists face in setting up and curating datasets and the associated digital infrastructure. In response to these challenges, the data paper highlights the benefits of low-code platforms and ai-augmented code for archaeological research. It also describes the Arkas 2.0 development workflow, its new data structure, and its archiving process. The data paper concludes by suggesting that the use of low-code platforms combined with generative ai can democratise access to cutting-edge digital research infrastructure, bringing positive disruption to archaeology and the humanities.

Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Sharing and Emerging Postdigital Meaning-Making Practices in the Astronomy Community

AbstractFor decades, science communities have had digital technology embedded in their everyday work. However, new research infrastructures are amplifying the presence and use of digital technologies for scientists. In that respect, radio astronomy is undergoing a major transformation causing the community to enter a phase of postdigital work, due to the construction of the most sensitive telescope, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO), which scales the presence of digital technology and the amount of data generated. As new digital research infrastructure is set up, sociotechnical imaginaries—symbols and visions of a shared future—emerge, while others become obsolete thus impacting structures and practices of meaning-making. In this paper, we explore the disruptive potential of sociotechnical imaginaries and how astronomers using SKA pathfinder and precursor telescope data respond to these imaginaries and incorporate them into their meaning-making. The analysis shows that postdigital imaginaries related to data circulation, storage, archiving, and reuse have been amplified as SKA facilities and services are set up. Two changes are highlighted regarding a new postdigital condition within the astronomy community. Firstly, as astronomers engage in new postdigital forms of collaboration, they need to reach a consensus on what types of analyses to use by agreeing which methods are appropriate. This affects how scientific questions and research proposals are negotiated collectively, impacting the agency of astronomers. Secondly, as digital tools are increasingly part of astronomers’ daily work, they have to rely on new data analysis methods, which determine what evidence is uninteresting. Overall, these changes pose new questions regarding how meaning-making processes are altered and the way science is undertaken because of these new entanglements of human and non-human actors.

From Lima to Canton and Beyond: Mobile and Digital Research Infrastructure for Closing the Gap Between Resource-rich and Resource-poor Organisations

ABSTRACT Access to research infrastructure for heritage science is the best way of narrowing the collections knowledge gap between resource-rich and resource-poor cultural institutions. Here we demonstrate a novel workflow that streamlines the use of a mobile laboratory for data collection (MOLAB) followed by a digital platform for data processing, analysis and interpretation (DIGILAB). The data collection and processing are taken care of by heritage science specialists, while the data analysis and interpretation can be performed collaboratively with conservators and curators. MOLAB with specialist personnel and mobile scientific instruments can sometimes be aided by in-house fixed laboratory (FIXLAB) equipment and personnel from resource-rich institutions to assist the resource-poor institutions if their collection can be hosted by the resource-rich institutions for analysis. The aim is to widen participation in the adoption of heritage science and material analysis in the understanding and conservation of collections, while ensuring high-quality, efficient and reliable data acquisition, processing, analysis and interpretation. The approach taken in this project combines access to various research infrastructure platforms to achieve extra benefit through adding further expert-assisted data analysis and interpretation capabilities, enabled by a new digital platform for data processing and visualisation.

Extractivism and the ecology of research infrastructure: digitizing precarious materialities in Iquitos, Peru

ABSTRACT How might the creation of digital research infrastructure for preserving archival materials in Latin America resemble the infrastructure of extractivism? This essay examines the development of a digital repository for one of the most important collections of Amazonian history, culture, and politics at the Biblioteca Amazónica in Iquitos, Peru. Funded in part by the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) at the University of California, Los Angeles, the project seeks to digitally catalog and preserve photographs, newspapers, maps, and local journals at risk of further damage by humidity, rodents, lack of funding, and potential fires. In dialogue with critical infrastructure studies, I consider how this otherwise altruistic project fits into the broader landscape of extractive infrastructure in the Amazon region. To problematize what materialities might be flattened in the process of digitalization and their implications for the potential digital colonialism of the project, I compare the MEAP research infrastructure to other infrastructural projects in the Iquitos area, with special emphasis on the kinds of relational encounters that Iquiteños improvise when infrastructure does not work as intended. I argue that creating similar opportunities to engage and struggle with digital research technologies has the potential to transform them for local use and complicate their potentially extractive qualities.

Transfiguring the Library as Digital Research Infrastructure: Making KBLab at the National Library of Sweden

Transfiguring the Library as Digital Research Infrastructure: Making KBLab at the National Library of Sweden

Measureing Carbon NetZero and the IRISCAST Project

Moving towards NetZero requires robust information to enable good decision making at all levels: covering hardware procurement, workload management and operations, as well as higher level aspects encompassing grant funding processes and policy framework development. The IRISCAST project is a proofof-concept study funded as part of the UKRI DRI Net-Zero Scoping Project. IRISCAST performed an audit of carbon costs across a multi-site heterogeneous infrastructure by collecting and analysing snapshots of actual usage across different facilities within the IRIS community (https://iris.ac.uk). Combining usage information with an analysis of the embodied carbon costs and careful mapping and consideration of the underlying assumptions resulted in an estimate of the overall carbon cost, an understanding of the key elements that contribute to the carbon cost, and the important metrics needed to measure it. IRISCAST makes reccomendations to allow high level feedback of carbon costs to funding bodies to inform strategic decisions as well as low level feedback of carbon costs to users and user communities to drive changes in user code bases and behaviors to be more carbon efficient. IRISCAST carbon modeling shows that estimates of carbon costs can vary by factors of 10, hence there is significant opportunity for the carbon footprint of Digital Research Infrastructures to be reduced.

Building Stakeholder Consensus Regarding Disclosure of Individual Research Results in ADRD Research: A Delphi Study Protocol

AbstractBackgroundInformed decisions to enroll in clinical investigations of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) require careful consideration of complex risks and uncertain benefits. Decisions regarding scope of research participation and whether to receive information about biomarker status are complicated by lack of scientific consensus regarding biomarkers as surrogate end points for Alzheimer’s disease. This Delphi protocol aims to establish stakeholder consensus regarding the content and features of ethically optimal informed consent support for ADRD research.MethodThis consensus‐building Delphi protocol consists of three rounds of online surveys conducted with three stakeholder groups: Alzheimer’s disease research experts (including ethicists, research oversight specialists, and clinical trialists), Alzheimer’s disease research participants, and study partners of individuals enrolled in ADRD research. Participants will be administered questionnaires developed from a synthesis of researcher‐ and participant‐endorsed decisional needs identified in published literature and a decisional needs assessment conducted with support from an Alzheimer’s Association Research Grant. Participants will also be asked their views on the design, content, and implementation of a decision support tool. ≥70% agreement will be required to achieve consensus. Response rates, level of agreement, medians, interquartile ranges, and group rankings will be analyzed. Following each round of data collection, our research team will undertake qualitative content analysis of open‐ended responses and forum interactions.ResultThis protocol will develop consensus regarding priorities for decision support for ADRD research participants and the key features and content of ethically optimal informed consent support interventions. The Delphi technique is appropriate to develop consensus between diverse stakeholders because of its ability to offer anonymity to other participants and minimize bias.ConclusionFindings will contribute to the development of a digital health research infrastructure that is inclusive of diverse individuals and attentive to the needs of cognitively vulnerable patient populations and their caregivers.

DARIAH-HR digital tools in the frame of Open Science

Responsibility, ethics, inclusiveness, and the principles of Open Science are central to the advancement of scholarly research and publishing. By embracing these values, we can create a more transparent, collaborative, and accessible research ecosystem, as proposed by UNESCO (2022). However, there is a pressing need for effective tools that aid researchers in practising Open Science while addressing the specific requirements of disciplines such as the Humanities and Arts, especially in the context of the welldocumented prevalence of STEM disciplines over the Humanities in the development of Open Science and Open Access trends (Eve, 2014). The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU) consortium, formed by "researchers for researchers", is uniquely positioned to address this inequality while driving the development of an open ecosystem that naturally evolves from authentic community practices and needs (Tóth-Czifra, 2021). Croatia as a member country with its DARIAH-HR coordination office readily follows it in this endeavour by organising workshops, creating one-of-a-kind digital platforms and tools, etc.In this poster presentation we aim to introduce several digital tools designed or codesigned by DARIAH-HR for scholars in the fields of the Humanities and Arts (and broader): 1) a digital tool for the creation of thesauri, 2) a digital tool for creating registers, 3) a digital tool for generating GDPR-compliant forms for obtaining consent from data subjects and 4) a software for modelling, processing and representation of monumental heritage and culture of memory. While the first and second tools represent pioneering efforts to encompass the widest community of humanists and researchers in Croatia, the third and fourth tools provide in-depth solutions in their respective areas of focus, extending their reach to an international level and catering to a diverse audience that includes researchers as well as tourists.The digital thesaurus creation tool “tezaurus.hr” is designed to streamline the process of developing structured vocabularies relevant to the Humanities and Arts. The digital register development tool “DH Register” provides a user-friendly interface (currently in development) that enables researchers to create and curate registries, incorporating metadata standards while adhering to the requirements of the FAIR principles (as recommended in, e.g., Hahnel & Valen, 2020). The “Consent Form Wizard” (CFW) is a tool developed by the DARIAH-EU working group Ethics and Legality in Digital Arts and Humanities (ELDAH) to support humanities researchers within the European Union in obtaining valid consent for data processing in the context of their specific professional activity. “Monument Heritage Map” is a digital platform that allows the implementation of available data and methods for data collection, processing, multimodal visualisation and mapping of cultural monuments.When integrated into an Open Science framework, these tools provide researchers with efficient means to enhance knowledge organisation, resource sharing, and collaboration while upholding responsible research practices and promoting inclusivity within the academic community. Enabling researchers to create user-friendly thesauri and registers also facilitates the discoverability, interoperability, and accessibility of research outputs. Conclusively, it contributes to the development of a robust and interconnected research infrastructure.Through the presentation of these digital tools and their implications, this poster seeks to contribute to the discourse surrounding responsible and inclusive research in the context of the Humanities and Arts. It emphasises the significance of training, education, and capacity building for Open Science.

The Human Brain Project Between Politics, Science, and Engineering

This article investigates the unfolding of increased political interest in research infrastructure at the practical level. As a case study, I examine the European Commission’s (EC) Human Brain Project (HBP). The HBP is a large-scale interdisciplinary project that aims to build a web-accessible digital research infrastructure for neuroscience, medical research, and information technology. The project provides a unique study case for observing interdisciplinary interaction within a large-scale project for infrastructure building in brain science, where small-scale research has been the norm. I analyze how the stances of the EC and the HBP members on the project’s goal and organization have co-evolved by focusing on the project’s two radical reorientations. Thus, I describe the HBP’s tangled trajectory as the result of the project’s shifting definition between research and infrastructure construction or between politics, science, and engineering.

Embracing Open Science at DARIAH-EU: How Openness Became a Bridge Between Research Infrastructure Strategy and Research Realities in the Arts and Humanities

When it was founded in 2014, DARIAH-EU, the European digital research infrastructure for arts and humanities, recognized the importance of open science but did not place particular emphasis on it. In the time since, however, openness has come to rest at the heart of everything the infrastructure does. This piece will look at the process by which a research infrastructure comes to view itself as both a resource and champion for open science in their community, and how the contributions of such organizations can uniquely enhance openness in the arts and humanities.

Open science in play and in tension with patent protections.

The open science (OS) movement has garnered increasing support in academia alongside continued financial and reputational incentives to obtain intellectual property (IP) protections over research outputs. Here, we explore stakeholder perspectives about intersections between OS and IP to inform the development of institutional OS guidelines for the neurosciences in Canada. We held six focus groups and three interviews with 29 faculty members from a major research and clinical center in Canada. The semi-structured interview guide probed perspectives on the respective roles of patents and OS in neuroscience-related research. We applied thematic content analysis to the transcript data, and extracted 12 major themes and 30 subthemes. Participants perceived a conflict between OS ideologies and the inherently restrictive nature of patents, and highlighted the importance of autonomy, justice, and respectful, culturally safe research practices in any future adoption of OS. Overall, the data suggest that a hybrid OS-IP policy model supported by local expertise may be best suited to meet the priorities and values of the community while mitigating perceived threats. This model includes expanded education about patenting, incentivized data sharing and collaboration, and tangible resources to support implementation of OS that includes skilled support in digital research infrastructures.

OPERAS-PL development strategy for local open scholarly communication

OPERAS is a European consortium-based research infrastructure for the social sciences and humanities (SSH). It has been established as an non-commercial initiative aimed at transforming the European research area of scholarly communication and therefore it is targeted at researchers, librarians, publishers and infrastructure providers in over a dozen of European countries. This rich and diverse group of stakeholders is the key to OPERAS’s success. The proposed poster will discuss this leading idea on the example of the OPERAS-PL – the Polish national node of the infrastructure. Maintenance of infrastructures, or simply speaking: digital tools and services facilitating scholarly communication, is certainly one of the biggest challenges from the economic point of view (Edmond, 2020). However, the other challenging aspect is actually making truly useful, used and vivid tools, adjusting to stakeholders’ needs and fulfilling them (Anderson, 2013; van Zundert, 2012). One of OPERAS’s strategic plans for this to happen is the network of national nodes established in each of the partner countries (Consortium OPERAS, 2022). The nodes’ primary goal is to disseminate OPERAS services, attract users and involve new partners. However, their mission should be perceived wider. As national points of contact they actually may become the levers of the whole infrastructure’s development and perseverance – similarly to DARIAH-EU (the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) whose sustainability relies precisely on its scattered and bottom-up structure (Edmond, 2020). Our poster presents the development strategy for the Polish National Node OPERAS-PL, along with its mission, primary goals and milestones, targeted audiences, funding scheme, management methods and tools and risk mitigation. The strategy is analysed as a scalable model for similar initiatives which strive to enhance open scholarly practices in their respective communities. The poster builds on the recently launched project funded by the Polish Ministry of Education and Science and introduces two pilot research pursuits aiming at recognising the needs of the Polish SSH communities. The first pilot will study academic publishers’ needs in the field of open access. Through a design thinking technique we will recognise their needs and create a sustainability model for open access book publishing that will accomodate the specificity of Polish stakeholders. The second one will examine the potential of digital monographs as equivalent to traditional monographs in the Polish academic evaluation system. We will use our infrastructure for digital editions and adapt it to address the needs of book authors and publishers. The results of the pilots will be disseminated in the coming years at the Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing and other events.

Open, Collaborative Commons: Web3, Blockchain, and Next Steps for the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons

This paper provides an update on the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an in-development online hub for open social scholarship in Canada and beyond, and considers the next steps for the platform in an ever-evolving digital landscape. It outlines various recent outreach and engagement events intended to introduce the Canadian HSS Commons to the larger communities to which it belongs. Because the Canadian HSS Commons is committed to supporting the growth and evolving needs of these communities, this paper also considers how increasingly popular internet technologies such as Web3 and blockchain might play a part in the future of digital research infrastructure and the Canadian HSS Commons specifically. It concludes that while Web3 and blockchain currently raise important questions and concerns about governance, accountability, and commercialization, in the near future, these same technologies could also help engender new forms of functionality and participation on the Commons.

Linking Brain Structure, Activity, and Cognitive Function through Computation.

Understanding the human brain is a "Grand Challenge" for 21st century research. Computational approaches enable large and complex datasets to be addressed efficiently, supported by artificial neural networks, modeling and simulation. Dynamic generative multiscale models, which enable the investigation of causation across scales and are guided by principles and theories of brain function, are instrumental for linking brain structure and function. An example of a resource enabling such an integrated approach to neuroscientific discovery is the BigBrain, which spatially anchors tissue models and data across different scales and ensures that multiscale models are supported by the data, making the bridge to both basic neuroscience and medicine. Research at the intersection of neuroscience, computing and robotics has the potential to advance neuro-inspired technologies by taking advantage of a growing body of insights into perception, plasticity and learning. To render data, tools and methods, theories, basic principles and concepts interoperable, the Human Brain Project (HBP) has launched EBRAINS, a digital neuroscience research infrastructure, which brings together a transdisciplinary community of researchers united by the quest to understand the brain, with fascinating insights and perspectives for societal benefits.

A Lockpick's Guide to dataARC: Designing Infrastructures and Building Communities to Enable Transdisciplinary Research

The North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) community initiated dataARC to develop digital research infrastructures to support their work on long-term human-ecodynamics in the North Atlantic. These infrastructures were designed to address the challenges of sharing research data, the connections between those data and high-level interpretations, and the interpretations themselves. In parallel, they were also designed to support the reuse of diverse data that underpin transdisciplinary synthesis research and to contextualise materials disseminated widely to the public more firmly in their evidence base. This article outlines the research infrastructure produced by the project and reflects on its design and development. We outline the core motivations for dataARC's work and introduce the tools, platforms and (meta)data products developed. We then undertake a critical review of the project's workflow. This review focuses on our understanding of the needs of stakeholder groups, the principles that guided the design of the infrastructure, and the extent to which these principles are successfully promoted in the current implementation. Drawing on this assessment, we consider how the infrastructure, in whole or in part, might be reused by other transdisciplinary research communities. Finally, we highlight key socio-technical gaps that may emerge as structural barriers to transdisciplinary, engaged, and open research if left unaddressed.

Activities and projects of the Bibliographical Data Working Group (DARIAH-EU)

The material aims to introduce the Bibliographical Data Working Group – part of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU) – and to feature projects fulfilled by this group. This working group since 2019 brings together specialists (as of today: 38 researchers) from a number of different countries and the main goals of the group are to foster the development of cooperation between bibliographies and serve as a platform for knowledge exchange aimed at bringing together creators of bibliographical data, scholars interested in using those resources in data-driven research, and theorists of bibliography and documentation. In the presentation two projects are described in detail: 1. the report “An analysis of the current bibliographic data landscape in the humanities: Bibliodata curation, research, and collaboration; 2. The project “Multilingual encyclopaedic dictionary of types of documents”. The purpose of the article is not only to describe these projects but above all to invite Congress members to collaborate on them.

The varying openness of digital open science tools

Background: Digital tools that support open science practices play a key role in the seamless accumulation, archiving and dissemination of scholarly data, outcomes and conclusions. Despite their integration into open science practices, the providence and design of these digital tools are rarely explicitly scrutinized. This means that influential factors, such as the funding models of the parent organizations, their geographic location, and the dependency on digital infrastructures are rarely considered. Suggestions from literature and anecdotal evidence already draw attention to the impact of these factors, and raise the question of whether the open science ecosystem can realise the aspiration to become a truly “unlimited digital commons” in its current structure. Methods: In an online research approach, we compiled and analysed the geolocation, terms and conditions as well as funding models of 242 digital tools increasingly being used by researchers in various disciplines. Results: Our findings indicate that design decisions and restrictions are biased towards researchers in North American and European scholarly communities. In order to make the future open science ecosystem inclusive and operable for researchers in all world regions including Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania, those should be actively included in design decision processes. Conclusions: Digital open science tools carry the promise of enabling collaboration across disciplines, world regions and language groups through responsive design. We therefore encourage long term funding mechanisms and ethnically as well as culturally inclusive approaches serving local prerequisites and conditions to tool design and construction allowing a globally connected digital research infrastructure to evolve in a regionally balanced manner.

We need to talk about the lack of investment in digital research infrastructure.

Research software infrastructure is critical for accelerating science, and yet, these digital public goods are often unsustainably funded. Solving this problem requires an appreciation of the intrinsic value of research software outputs, and greater investment of time and effort into effectively funding maintenance of software at scale.

Entity-fishing: A DARIAH Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Service

This paper presents an attempt to provide a generic named-entity recognition and disambiguation module (NERD) called entity-fishing as a stable online service that demonstrates the possible delivery of sustainable technical services within DARIAH, the European digital research infrastructure for the arts and humanities. Deployed as part of the national infrastructure Huma-Num in France, this service provides an efficient state-of-the-art implementation coupled with standardised interfaces allowing an easy deployment on a variety of potential digital humanities contexts. Initially developed in the context of the FP9 EU project CENDARI, the software was well received by the user community and continued to be further developed within the H2020 HIRMEOS project where several open access publishers have integrated the service to their collections of published monographs as a means to enhance retrieval and access. entity-fishing implements entity extraction as well as disambiguation against Wikipedia and Wikidata entries. The service is accessible through a REST API which allows easier and seamless integration, language independent and stable convention and a widely used service-oriented architecture (SOA) design. Input and output data are carried out over a query data model with a defined structure providing flexibility to support the processing of partially annotated text or the repartition of text over several queries. The interface implements a variety of functionalities, like language recognition, sentence segmentation and modules for accessing and looking up concepts in the knowledge base. The API itself integrates more advanced contextual parametrisation or ranked outputs, allowing for the resilient integration in various possible use cases. The entity-fishing API has been used as a concrete use case to draft the experimental stand-off proposal, which has been submitted for integration into the TEI guidelines. The representation is also compliant with the Web Annotation Data Model (WADM). In this paper we aim at describing the functionalities of the service as a reference contribution to the subject of web-based NERD services. In this paper, we detail the workflow from input to output and unpack each building box in the processing flow. Besides, with a more academic approach, we provide a transversal schema of the different components taking into account non-functional requirements in order to facilitate the discovery of bottlenecks, hotspots and weaknesses. We also describe the underlying knowledge base, which is set up on the basis of Wikipedia and Wikidata content. We conclude the paper by presenting our solution for the service deployment: how and which the resources where allocated. The service has been in production since Q3 of 2017, and extensively used by the H2020 HIRMEOS partners during the integration with the publishing platforms.

The varying openness of digital open science tools

Background: Digital tools that support open science practices play a key role in the seamless accumulation, archiving and dissemination of scholarly data, outcomes and conclusions. Despite their integration into open science practices, the providence and design of these digital tools are rarely explicitly scrutinized. This means that influential factors, such as the funding models of the parent organizations, their geographic location, and the dependency on digital infrastructures are rarely considered. Suggestions from literature and anecdotal evidence already draw attention to the impact of these factors, and raise the question of whether the open science ecosystem can realise the aspiration to become a truly “unlimited digital commons” in its current structure. Methods: In an online research approach, we compiled and analysed the geolocation, terms and conditions as well as funding models of 242 digital tools increasingly being used by researchers in various disciplines. Results: Our findings indicate that design decisions and restrictions are biased towards researchers in North American and European scholarly communities. In order to make the future open science ecosystem inclusive and operable for researchers in all world regions including Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania, those should be actively included in design decision processes. Conclusions: Digital open science tools carry the promise of enabling collaboration across disciplines, world regions and language groups through responsive design. We therefore encourage long term funding mechanisms and ethnically as well as culturally inclusive approaches serving local prerequisites and conditions to tool design and construction allowing a globally connected digital research infrastructure to evolve in a regionally balanced manner.