Going Digital: Creating Change in the Humanities

The report contains the ALLEA E-Humanities working group's recommendations regarding key requirements to ensure continued growth and excellence in the Digital Humanities for the EU. The 3 Key Recommendations are Take a long-term view, Encourage openness and Support your People.

1) Take a long-term view:

Sustaining long-term archives of unique and important cultural artefacts is critical for Europe’s leadership in Digital Humanities. We recommend a move to funding models which are not project-based, the certification of digital infrastructures, appropriate funding evaluation, pan-European policies and strategies, and adoption of best practice in digitisation and metadata standards and vocabularies. Researchers should look to large organisations such as the Research Data Alliance and DARIAH for best practices.

2) Encourage openness:

An open approach to data enables research integrity, increased secondary research and cost-effective data production. Open Access should be incentivised and increasingly mandated, data management plans should be required with all funding proposals, and data archiving costs should be included as eligible costs. Training and open repository services should be openly available, and standardised data citation should be adopted and recognised.

3) Support your people:

In Digital Humanities the people are no less important than the infrastructures and technologies. Career progression models should include recognition for the importance of data activities including data design, collection, curation, and management. Specialist training should be funded, openly accessible and certified. The roles in data management such as data librarian, data scientist, data archivist, should be recognised in the research community as trained and skilled roles.