Soft Skills in Hard Places, or Is the Digital Future of Graduate Study in the Humanities outside of the University?

What Is DARIAH?

Although research infrastructures enjoy a long history in forms such as libraries and laboratories, DARIAH is part of a specifically European and specifically contemporary branch of this tradition. DARIAH’s formation was sanctioned by its 2006 inclusion in the first road map for the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). This document that laid out an integrated plan for the enhancement and coordination of Europe’s facilities, data, collections, instrumentation, and other specialized assets for the advancement of research and innovation. DARIAH was legally constituted in 2014 as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (or ERIC, as they are commonly known throughout Europe), a specific legal entity established by the European Commission, as a research infrastructure specifically serving arts and humanities. Today, the transnational DARIAH network works across over 230 institutions from more than twenty member countries throughout Europe, facilitating the integration, creation, sharing, and reuse of tools, data, and knowledge. For a general introduction to DARIAH and the notion of infrastructures as knowledge spaces, see Edmond et al. 2020.

As per the DARIAH Strategic Plan 2019–2026, DARIAH organizes its work around four key pillars: building a “marketplace” for the exchange of tools and services; enabling transnational collaboration by supporting working groups and regional hubs; extending bridges between research policy and communities of practice, and consolidating access to training and education.1 This last pillar in particular acknowledges DARIAH’s commitment and key role in the development and support of pedagogy within higher education and beyond, although in practice, DARIAH’s commitment to the formation of young researchers stretches across all of its activities, as will be discussed in more detail below.

Challenges of Digital Humanities Pedagogy

As we continue to develop our understanding of what it means to teach the digital humanities, we need also to reconsider the utility, responsibility, and potential contributions of actors other than universities in this process and how we integrate them into recognized learning pathways. The experiences of integrating research infrastructures show the ways in which doing so will allow us to invent new frameworks for the teaching and learning of the digital humanities. For example, the integration of research infrastructures can enable peer learning, identified as the most desirable and effective way digital humanities skills are transferred (Antonijevic, Amongst Digital Humanists). Yet this peer-instructed approach is not without its challenges, as it draws upon the time resources of an academic, which, as Antonjevic notes, is a scholar’s most precious resource. Where peer-instructed learning is not an option, often it is the institutional library that steps in to deliver more formal training, but initiating these types of workshops often results in disappointment; instead, word-of-mouth is typically one of the main ways in which scholars at all career stages learn about new techniques and developments in their field (Antonijevic, Amongst Digital Humanists; Garnett and Papaki, “Case Studies in Communities”).

The integration of research infrastructures into formal teaching programs will enable students to see beyond narrow institutional perspectives in the development of resources, possibly contributing to a reduction in the creation of resources that are not properly imagined for reuse by others. For example, Brett Hirsch refers to what he calls the “bracketed” status of the topic of his work: “By ‘bracketing’ I refer to the almost systematic relegation of the word ‘teaching’ (or its synonyms) to the status of afterthought, tacked-on to a statement about the digital humanities after the word ‘research’” (Digital Humanities Pedagogy, 5). Matthew Gold’s assessment of the state of the field at that time was similar: “The digital humanities, as a field, would benefit from a more direct engagement with issues of teaching and learning than it has exhibited thus far” (“Looking for Whitman,” 153). Although some further work has appeared since that time, the phenomenon that Hirsch observes—in which the ways that digital humanities knowledge is transmitted takes a subsidiary role to that of how it is created—does appear still to be the case. In addition, to the extent that it has been theorized, work on digital humanities pedagogy has tended to be strongly tied to the classroom experience: how to embed the digital into the traditional humanities teaching experience, what tools to use (or not), and how to balance between theoretical understanding and active participation. This may seem a banal observation or at best a recognition of something natural and expected, but we should remember that a classroom experience, no matter how well-constructed, exists within a particular social and institutional framework: students, seeking knowledge, experience, or qualification; one or more instructors, with mastery of a body of knowledge; and, usually, institutional or curricular boundaries, those “hidden histories” of disciplinary communities as well as the embodiments of a “political vision” (Terras, “Disciplined,” 13; Simon, cited in Hirsch, Digital Humanities Pedagogy, 27). These restrictions can fly in the face of the stated aim of many of the pedagogical experiments described in the literature to “reconfigur[e] the academic journey itself” (Saklofske et al., “They Have Come,” 323).

Perhaps most importantly, the integration of research infrastructures will allow students to experience alternative environments for the use and production of digital humanities resources, building not just their skills but their networks and expanding their imaginations for how they might use these skills in the future. Incorporating contexts such as research infrastructures into digital humanities pedagogy can therefore go beyond the call that “the sage must step off the stage and circulate in real and virtual realms” to a new theater of learning in which many students circulate with many teachers, working together to deliver something in the wider context of infrastructure provision (Saklofske et al., “They Have Come,” 319). Under such a vision, learning will focus not just on digital humanities or even on a discipline in which a student or researcher seeks to use digital humanities methodologies, a distinction already made by Ryan Cordell, but also on how these practices engage interdependent communities with intersecting concerns (“How Not to Teach”). As Diane Jakacki stated in her keynote talk at the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société Canadienne des Humanités Numériques (CSDH/SCHN) 2016 conference in Calgary, the traditional model of having a single instructor (perhaps accompanied by a teaching assistant) does not work for digital humanities courses and needs to change to reflect the complementary skillsets that different experts can bring through an evolving model that allows work to expand (“How We Teach?”).

In the years since the appearance of works by Hirsch and Gold dedicated to digital humanities pedagogy, additional work has naturally appeared with a few strong organizing themes dominating. The first of these is the role of libraries in the teaching of digital humanities and the development of appropriate approaches and pedagogies to underpin this (e.g., Varner, “Library Instruction for Digital Humanities Pedagogy”; Fay and Nyhan, “Webbs on the Web”; Burns, “Role of the Information Professional”; Hartsell-Gundy et al., Digital Humanities in the Library). Another cluster within the work focuses on how to develop pedagogies around specific tools, disciplines, or approaches such as digital storytelling, electronic literature, or Virtual Research Environments (Barber, “Digital Storytelling”; Saum-Pascual, “Teaching Electronic Literature”; Bellamy, “Sound of Many Hands”). A third interesting set of convergent perspectives appears around the question of how to teach digital humanities without letting it become an end in itself and without losing the essentials of teaching (e.g., Cordell, “How Not to Teach”; Ives, “Digital Humanities Pedagogy”). One of the most interesting examples within this cohort is Paul Fyfe’s essay “Mid-Sized Digital Pedagogy,” which, by reflecting on the range of pedagogical spaces between massive open online courses (MOOCs) and “sequestered learning” comes out strongly in favor of a number of methods by which to foster student-led, and, in particular, experiential approaches to learning.

In taking this focus, Fyfe’s work echoes earlier work by Rockwell and Sinclair, which has particular resonance for the question of how research infrastructures might play an expanded role in digital humanities education and training. Rockwell, who had previously observed that in the digital humanities, “there are few formal ways that people can train” (“Inclusion in the Digital Humanities”), makes a significant contribution, with his coauthor, to breaking down this barrier in “Acculturation and the Digital Humanities Community.” As Rockwell and Sinclair describe, the challenge of digital humanities pedagogy and the rethinking of teaching needs to begin at the most fundamental level: “One can think through a digital humanities curriculum in three ways. One can ask what should be the intellectual content of a program and parse it up into courses; one can imagine the skills taught in a program and ensure that they are covered; or one can ensure that the acculturation and professionalization that takes place in the learning community is relevant to the students” (178). From the research infrastructure perspective, of most interest is this third path, because, as Rockwell and Sinclair assert, digital humanists typically “work in interdisciplinary teams, apply digital practices to the humanities, manage projects or collaborate in the management, explain technology and build community,” tasks that are more a matter of practice, or more about the how rather than the what (“Acculturation and the Digital Humanities Community,” 182). These are very much the kinds of approaches that are best viewed as a cultural transmission of values and practices, rather than one of skills. Rockwell and Sinclair focus on how students can engage with real teams and real projects, but the initiatives they describe do still give the impression of being constrained by the traditional formal classroom model.

In response to these trends, research infrastructures such as DARIAH have taken on an important role in addressing the challenges to digital humanities pedagogy, particularly as they pertain to an emerging understanding of those aspects of acculturation that in other venues are referred to under the rubric of generic or transferable skills. How the increasing importance of transferable skills has been applied in higher educational training, and how research infrastructures are ideally placed to address this, is discussed in the following sections.

Digital Transferable Skills for Early Career Researchers

If the future of higher education is indeed “flexibility,” if we agree that we need to encourage “multi-skilled profiles” and “multi-contextual learning practices,” and if we recognize the educational challenges of “knowmad society,” we need to seriously consider the role that digital humanities pedagogy, in general, and research infrastructures such as DARIAH, in particular, can play in providing twenty-first-century skills and competencies (Zimpher, “Future of Higher Education”; Cobo, “Skills and Competencies,” 59; Moravec, Knowmad Society).

Part of the answer to this question lies in the recent increase in focus on generic and transferable skills in postgraduate education. Although this focus was rooted in a broad skillset related to research disciplines, the focus later shifted toward explicitly recognizing digital skills across all disciplines. Within its 2018 Skills Report, for example, Eurodoc specifically mentioned skills relating to “digital” competencies but also more humanistic traits such as the “cognitive” skills of abstraction and creativity, critical thinking, and analysis and synthesis, as well as meta-level research skills including interdisciplinarity, open access publishing, and open data management (Weber et al., “Identifying and Documenting,” 4–5). All of these areas are central to digital humanities scholarly practice and key characteristics of the work conducted by European research infrastructures such as DARIAH. Policy recommendations surrounding the teaching of digital transferable skills in Europe should be seen against the backdrop of similar moves elsewhere. The U.S.-based National Science Foundation highlighted, as part of its 10 Big Ideas project, the importance of exploring and investing in the “future of work” with four connected research themes: building the human-technology partnership, augmenting human performance, illuminating the sociotechnological landscape, and fostering lifelong learning (Rockwell, “Inclusion in the Digital Humanities”).

Moving from strict disciplinary conceptualizations of postgraduate training can challenge institutions structured according to those very disciplines. Recognizing the role that nonacademic institutions such as research infrastructures, often interdisciplinary and multi-institutional in nature as they are, can play in the development of those key skills is therefore advantageous. Approaching these challenges from outside the established structures and hierarchies that give strength to the higher education institution opens opportunities for new kinds of players building upon different conceptual foundations. For the digital humanities, research infrastructures have been one such smaller and less formal, but well-focused, group providing such a response.

Research Infrastructures and Digital Humanities Training in the Humanities

Training and education were not, however, at the strategic forefront of research infrastructures from the very beginning. Some reasons for this lie in the relationships between universities (as organizations delivering teaching and research) and other forms of research performing organizations (RPO) including research infrastructures, a differentiation that is distinct in some countries such as France or Italy and not a consideration at all in others such as the United Kingdom and Ireland. As this model has given rise to a perception that education and accreditation of early career researchers is a role for educational institutions only, research infrastructures seldom possess the kinds of specialized procedures, staff, resources, and expertise to deliver formal educational programs. Indeed, it is the lack of this layer that most distinctly differentiates activities of the research infrastructures, and many other forms of RPO, from those of the more familiar academic context.

This gap can be seen in a number of the practices of research infrastructures. A 2016 survey of user needs assessments undertaken by research infrastructure and research infrastructure projects addressed the skills development needs of their users or potential users and came to the following conclusion: “The most striking observation is that research infrastructure projects seldom strategise or theorise explicitly about their training interventions, and how they interact with the wider environment of digital humanities” (Edmond et al., “PARTHENOS D7.1 Initial Training Plan”). In fact, with one exception (that of the explicitly training-focused #dariahTeach project described below), the many research infrastructures and research infrastructure projects surveyed would, despite explicitly featuring training activities in their workplans and communications, focus almost exclusively on a definition of skills that reached only as far as an awareness of the specific tools the research infrastructure was either developing, deploying, or both. Any further bridging or boundary competencies that might have been relevant seemed to fall out of consideration. The situation is further complicated by the fact that researchers, and in particular postgraduate students, are often not equipped with the expertise to recognize gaps in their own knowledge and determine how they might seek ways to close those gaps, particularly as the model of face-to-face training, either as part of a long-term degree course or a shorter summer-to-winter school approach, is seen as the optimal choice over online or long-distance learning (Wissik et al., “Teaching Digital Humanities”).

As these organizations consolidate and their role in the research ecosystem becomes better understood, policies and practices are beginning to shift. Research infrastructures are rapidly becoming aware not only of the kinds of knowledge they create but also of the distinct learning opportunities they can offer, along the lines of the idea of acculturation discussed previously in this chapter. The drivers for this shift are many and include both internal and external as well as top-down and bottom-up impulses. For example, from the perspective of the European Commission, increasing emphasis within the consideration of the sustainability of research infrastructures is being placed upon the need to have the right people with the right skills in the right places at the right time (ESFRI, “Long Term Sustainability”; European Commission, “Sustainable European Research Infrastructures”). Furthermore, as these very researchers come to take up posts in a facilitating or enabling capacity within research infrastructures, the career paths and perceptions they introduce regarding the researcher-infrastructure relationship have begun to change attitudes from within (Edmond, “Are Para-Academic Career Paths”). This shift in priorities also leverages the research infrastructures’ emphasis on the mobility of people and ideas, in particular in niche areas. In total, these many forces are fostering a growing awareness among research infrastructures of the importance of developing and sustaining human capital.

A number of the specific responses that have emerged from humanities-focused research infrastructures due to the need to foster skills development at a higher level than previously are discussed below. But it is important to clarify that for all of their increased commitment to making the acquisition of skills accessible for new cohorts of scholars, the research infrastructures still do not engage in formal certification of these skills, for the reasons outlined above. Many researchers are adequately served by this differentiated landscape and do indeed simply want to understand their tools in order to carry out their analyses, but others might see the wide variety of opportunities within digital humanities as more integral to their career paths and curricula vitae. For these individuals, a pathway that could combine research infrastructure-based knowledge and skills and formal accreditation would perhaps be more attractive.

We do not think that DARIAH or any research infrastructure for that matter should reinvent itself as a university. We do believe, however, that an increased and more systematic collaboration between higher education institutions and research infrastructures should be explored because they can offer different modalities of embedded learning that are practically impossible to achieve following traditional curricula in university classrooms and because universities—with their enormous cultural capital—would be well positioned to stimulate new mechanisms and practices of learning.

DARIAH’s Pedagogical Interventions

If the defining aspect of the university training setting is the focused interaction of the classroom, research infrastructures similarly utilize their key capabilities to support training by providing platforms, registries, and other forms of asynchronous, learner-driven (or train-the-trainers-focused) access to resources. This trajectory can be mapped through time via the development of four distinct resources: the Course Registry, DARIAH Teach, the PARTHENOS Training Suite, and DARIAH Campus.

Emerging originally from a DARIAH working group and further developing through collaboration with CLARIN ERIC Consortium, the Digital Humanities Course Registry (DHCR) addressed a need for greater visibility of digital humanities training activities beyond an individual’s typical network at a university level (see Sahle et al., “Digitale Geisteswissenschaften”; Thaller, “Towards a Reference Curriculum”; Wissik et al., “Teaching Digital Humanities”).2 The DHCR began as a simple spreadsheet in German to become a multilingual, web-based interactive map featuring contributions from members of the two research infrastructure communities. It has thus become a key port of call, particularly relevant in the context of this chapter for students who want to undertake some manner of formal training in digital humanities and for course providers who want to promote their course internationally (Wissik et al., “Teaching Digital Humanities”). The DHCR further champions findability through a catalog of courses that is both filtered and searchable. Those courses that are included must have a balance between a humanities and digital or computational content. Quality control is assured through national moderators within CLARIN and DARIAH member countries, who also ensure the DHCR is kept current.

The DHCR may not be in itself a location for training, but it represents a significant enhancement to the findability of training options provided through formal means, such as universities, or through established and long-running workshops or summer-to-winter school programs. It also highlights what can be achieved through collaboration at a pan-European level, such as the two research infrastructures we find in CLARIN and DARIAH, beyond the formal higher education framework. It represents an intervention unique to the strengths of a research infrastructure, where the creation and maintenance of registries are an essential form of intervention these organizations are uniquely able to deliver openly and sustainably.

Elsewhere within the DARIAH ecosystem, the first innovation toward the production of training materials emerged from a growing awareness that although many educational programs were beginning to include digital methods, few institutions had the staff and resources to offer expertise in the full range of current methods and approaches. #dariahTeach, a full Moodle-based environment for digital humanities courses and workshops, is designed for use and reuse in university courses so as to enhance student access to advanced methods, strengthen alliances between institutions, and foster innovative teaching and learning practices (Schreibman et al., “#dariahTeach”).3 It was developed with sharing, reuse, and localization (in terms of language and examples) as key design objectives, balancing a role as a support for instructors with one as a locus for self-study.

As such, #dariahTeach “courses” (with proposed five and ten ECTS equivalents4) and smaller “workshops” (without ECTS points attached to them) are designed at the intersections of theory and practice and provide ample opportunities for students to develop fundamental skills necessary to create, implement, and engage with scholarly digital objects (e.g., textual, audio, video, 2D, and 3D). At the same time, the offerings are designed to contribute to the development of critical thinking about areas such as digital preservation and the exploitation and transformation of cultural heritage as a vital educational goal in a pluralistic, reflective society.

The strength of #dariahTeach was in its close mapping to the higher education curriculum; however, this left a gap. As mentioned, traditional conceptualizations of training in research infrastructures often did not stretch beyond the specific tooling that they themselves hosted. The formal educational toolkit, however, tended to focus on applications of technology to specific humanities contexts. These parallel developments left a space between them that did not necessarily allow expertise from one context to easily flow to the other, a gap particularly felt in the transfer of skills from educational to professional contexts in the research infrastructures. DARIAH therefore launched the development of the PARTHENOS (Pooling Activities, Resources and Tools for Heritage E-research Networking, Optimization and Synergies) Training Suite to serve researchers, content specialists in Cultural Heritage Institutions, technical developers and computer scientists, and managers of institutions and projects.5

The PARTHENOS Training Suite applied an approach different from #dariahTeach, focusing less on enhancing ECTS-linked courses or on skills traditionally taught in digital humanities university courses, but rather on issues more specific to the infrastructural frame of reference, such as challenges of management and collaboration, open data management, ontologies, and citizen science. The materials included in the modules were designed so that they did not necessarily need to be undertaken as a whole, but rather sections or materials such as slideshows, lecture videos, or shorter videos could be used for self-study or reused by trainers within their own courses without modification if required.

By 2019, the Research Infrastructure educational toolkit emerging out of DARIAH’s work had proven its utility but had become in some ways a victim of its own success, with users not necessarily understanding the different strengths of the multiple platforms or being able to move easily between them. Therefore, DARIAH-Campus was launched as both a discovery framework (in that it compiles and provides links to existing training materials that can be searched via the DARIAH-Campus website) and a hosting platform for DARIAH and DARIAH-affiliated offerings in training and education.6 The goal of DARIAH-Campus is to widen access to open, inclusive, high-quality learning materials that aim to enhance creativity, skills, technology, and knowledge in the digitally enabled arts and humanities.

All four of these training and education outputs from DARIAH provide a means for course providers in higher education institutions to integrate research infrastructure outputs into their formal training programs with minimal work on their part. They also, however, offer introductory pathways for students inside or outside of formal education to hone their skills following a different development paradigm shaped by the ethos of research infrastructures rather than those of higher education.

Getting beyond the Data: Training Events

Platforms and registries are key assets that research infrastructures can and do use to address the needs of early career researchers, before and after the completion of the PhD, but they are by no means the only ones. Such relatively blunt instruments can perhaps be seen as mapping onto those aspects of a formal degree program that curate and deliver a preselected, clearly defined set of skills. But one of the most essential modes by which confidence and competence in any field are established is at the interface where teaching becomes mentoring and when instruction becomes the cocreation of knowledge. This dynamic, personalized form of exchange becomes ever more important as an individual begins to establish an independent research career and trajectory, where their own expertise begins to emerge, and in some ways perhaps even to eclipse the specific areas in which a specific institutional team may have direct expertise.

An EDUCAUSE survey from 2019 found that 73 percent of surveyed faculty members from 118 U.S. institutions preferred “completely” face-to-face teaching environments (Galanek et al., “ECAR Study of Faculty,” 7). Among student respondents, the numbers were similar, with 70 percent saying they preferred mostly or completely face-to-face learning. This should come as no surprise: humans crave social interaction. While the experiences of the global Covid-19 pandemic have perhaps made us more savvy about how and when virtual and asynchronous teaching modalities can be effectively used, the experience of forced distance has also made the benefits of presence all the more keenly felt. Digital technologies can facilitate communication, but they cannot completely replace the need for and the benefits of nonmediated physical presence.

That is why DARIAH does not focus only on producing and disseminating virtual learning opportunities and organizes two different kinds of face-to-face training measures: those addressing specific communities and those addressing specific topics. It also supports access to face-to-face training more generally, for example, by providing financial assistance to existing training events such as the European Summer University Culture and Technology at the University of Leipzig or the Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon.7

Events for specific communities offer an opportunity for intensive work on topics relevant to a particular academic discipline. The DARIAH Working Group Lexical Resources, for instance, runs the Lexical Data Masterclass, a hands-on training measure for twenty to twenty-five young scholars interested in learning about methods and techniques for the creation, management, and use of digital lexical data.8 The weeklong masterclasses cover a wide range of topics from general models for lexical content and Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)-based representation of lexical data to managing digital lexica as online resources and working efficiently with XML editors. The participants are given a chance to attend different sessions and consult one-on-one with experts on their own dictionary projects.

Events DARIAH organizes and promotes on general topics that are of interest to wider scholarly audiences include data management, open science, and research infrastructures. For instance, in December 2019, DARIAH organized a winter school on shaping new approaches to data management in arts and humanities at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the NOVA University in Lisbon. The event provided an opportunity for arts and humanities scholars, librarians, and research managers to learn how to maximize the potential of their scholarly resources and take practical steps in opening their research in ethically and legally responsible ways; the focus was on topics such as optimal implementation of FAIR (that is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data in the arts and humanities, issues around ethics, Intellectual Property Rights and licensing, data and software citation practices, open research notebooks, and innovative publishing practices (DARIAH-Campus, “Winter School”).

Lifelong Learning, Digital Humanities, and Research Infrastructure Approaches: Transnational Access Fellowships

In addition to providing both asynchronous and synchronous training in the traditional scope and sense, research infrastructures also promote a number of modes of engagement that build on the engaged scholarship model proposed and tested by Patricia Hswe and her collaborators, which “seeks to complement classroom-based learning with out-of-classroom experiences–as a means to explore an alternative pedagogical approach to digital scholarship” (“Tale of Two Internships,” 3). Although many master’s and PhD programs based in universities would similarly seek to promote internships and other forms of researcher mobility as a complement to institution-based aspects of their programs, European research infrastructures benefit from a long-established and discipline-neutral tradition unique to their own context and sphere of activity, a mechanism known as the Transnational Access (TNA) Fellowships. The duration and nature of these fellowships can vary from program to program and person to person, but in general, they would see a researcher from one country spending a period of weeks or months with a research infrastructure team.

TNA fellowships have been a part of how the function and added value of European research infrastructures have been conceptualized and funded for at least two decades. As with so many other aspects of the European research infrastructure landscape, however, this element of the generic research infrastructure model was systematized as of 2006 with the launch of the ESFRI roadmap, even if the importance of mobility and skills as elements of research infrastructure development and operations was not at the forefront of that document. More instructive in this sense is how TNA was conceptualized in some of the specific calls aimed at funding the development of research infrastructures. The 2016–2017 calls, produced in 2015, for example, stated, “The strongest impact of an integrating activity is expected typically to arise from a focus on networking, standardisation and establishing a common access procedure for trans-national and/or virtual access provision.”9 This only tells part of the story, however, as this document also makes clear the origins of transnational access in the conceptualization of the research infrastructure as a place or large assembly of instrumentation researchers would need to move to access, or sensitive personal data that could not be securely shared virtually. The research infrastructures in development at that time for the arts and humanities research community were therefore called upon to reinvent this model on the basis of specialist access to largely tacit knowledge or expertise, to labs and teams of people, rather than solely to the immovable objects of research infrastructure.

Two forerunner projects in this respect that were related to DARIAH were the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) and the Collaborative European Digital Archival Research Infrastructure (CENDARI), both of which had to reimagine TNA in order to make it a process that could be truly beneficial for the communities of historians those projects served. In its first phase of development, EHRI, despite its strong focus on facilitating access to memory institutions holding Holocaust records, would use TNA to spearhead the approach they referred to as “a technical infrastructure, a human network” (Uiterwaal et al., “PARTHENOS D7.4 Report,” 45). This approach was taken even further by CENDARI, for whom the community aspect of the fellowships was quickly recognized to be paramount. All in all, the program hosted twenty-eight fellows, all of whom were early career researchers, some working on PhDs, others having completed in the past five years.10 This was in itself an interesting result, as the call for applications for the fellowships stated that preference would be given to early career researchers but did not exclude senior researchers.

A 2019 assessment of TNA across five different EU research infrastructure projects reveals much about the reasons behind this appeal and the mechanisms that allowed access to the research infrastructures to become an unparalleled context for developing skills and competencies. A total of eighty-six former fellows were surveyed, of which sixty-eight rated their experience to have been excellent (8–10 points on a 10-point scale). Among the highlighted elements were having “designated time” to pursue their work and having access to “instructors of the highest quality” (Uiterwaal et al., “PARTHENOS D7.4 Report”). The assessment also made clear that many researchers felt that they were afforded opportunities to develop their work through time spent in a research infrastructure context that they otherwise would not have had. The spread of answers to a survey question about curricular embedding makes clear the much greater spread of responses (see Figure 27.1).

One respondent actually qualified their answer in a way that threw into sharp relief the different perspectives represented by their experiences: “My answers above are not stellar but that’s not the TNA programme’s fault, it’s rather a lack of interest in my research area from my own university.” Also interesting is the fact that almost 60 percent of fellows surveyed felt that they had learned or experienced something valuable that they had not expected (see Figure 27.2).

Things discovered “by chance” or in an “unplanned” manner ultimately framed many of the most valuable development opportunities these scholars experienced as a result of their placements. This aspect of the learning fostered by TNA underscores the value a research infrastructure with a wide network of partners can bring to the skills development of a young, or indeed mid-or advanced-career researcher. Harnessing their unique structure, organizations like DARIAH can provide unique, situated, tailored learning to suit a wide variety of needs.

Learning by Doing: Participation as Pedagogy

The continuum from the generic model embodied in training materials and training schools through to fellowships and other forms of short-term placement points onward to opportunities that research infrastructures facilitate. These are even more removed from the standard conceptualization of a postgraduate curriculum but can still be seen as ways in which postgraduates and early career researchers can build their skills, competencies, and ultimately their careers via research infrastructures. Although the TNA programs may represent a highly effective, co-constructed form of mentoring and informal training, they still maintain a certain knowledge hierarchy between the host and the visiting researcher. But DARIAH is also a place where the work and learning of postgraduates and early career researchers are deeply integrated into the day-to-day activities of the infrastructure. This can be seen from the perspective of a wide variety of facets of the organization, of which we would like to highlight four. First, DARIAH events are highly inclusive and attract a large percentage of young researchers. DARIAH’s community basis, which is stable from year to year, and methodological focus are often easier for researchers just establishing their networks to penetrate. This is true in particular when a large DARIAH event is held in cooperation with a local institute, as this makes for an excellent opportunity for that local group to participate in a major meeting without barriers of travel costs.

Many networks and organizations hold events, however, and it is the integration of these events with other mechanisms that make them such a powerful place to build skills and careers for young researchers. One of the strands of activity at every DARIAH annual event includes the meetings of many of DARIAH’s twenty-plus working groups. In an infrastructural context, these working groups provide an opportunity for an ad hoc group of researchers sharing similar goals to establish themselves under the DARIAH umbrella to build components and resolve barriers together. From a DARIAH perspective, they are a “non-competitive, non time-limited, lightweight, transnational mechanism” designed to “encourage the exchange and sharing among groups” (Edmond et al., “Springing the Floor,” 225), and this lack of excess formality in the mechanism has the effect of also making them very open. Many working groups, such as the Working Group for Community Engagement and the Working Group for Research Data Management, have been either founded or passed on to the leadership or co-leadership of early career researchers, often PhD students, who find the empowerment they can aspire to within the DARIAH structure gives them a visible and relevant platform to build skills related to research leadership, team management, and the agreement of and practical delivery against a working group’s shared vision.

Working groups are one of the four pillars of DARIAH’s 2019–2026 Strategic Plan and not the only one where we can see early career researchers building their profiles through an intensive engagement with the research infrastructure. For example, DARIAH’s policy work is largely focused on the delivery of open science within the arts and humanities, an area in which it is typically those researchers only starting their careers who are the strongest and most eloquent advocates for change. They make up a majority of the participants in workshops on this topic and are regularly featured through, for example, the infrastructures’ blogging competition (Hswe et al., “Tale of Two Internships”) and features on best practice (such as Tóth-Czifra, “Open Scholar Stars”). They also form a strong contingent now in the editorial team of the OpenMethods metablog (which had been established with a strong bias toward more senior scholars before DARIAH took it over in 2018). This leadership element from the grassroots has proven essential for DARIAH’s success as both a community and a research infrastructure, and it is no surprise that through these many engagement mechanisms, DARIAH has become not only a recognized source for building a skills base, but also for crafting a career in what might be seen as a parallel development in Europe to the North American “alternate academy” (Edmond, “Are Para-Academic Career Paths”).

Taking the challenges of digital humanities pedagogy and the experiences of the initiatives discussed above into consideration, a vision begins to emerge of a training ecosystem for digital humanities in which research students and early career researchers can develop their skills according to a model that harnesses the strengths of both the higher education institution and research infrastructure contexts. In this future vision, research infrastructures and higher education institutions will establish active educational partnership networks to validate new approaches to the skills needs of humanities students and researchers, looking beyond the frame of what is currently available in the context of formal educational programs. These networks would jointly explore curricular models and internship opportunities to enable the fluid exchange of knowledge and students between formal educational programs and the applied contexts of the research infrastructure. Furthermore, these networks would formalize and embed both awareness of and reuse modalities for the training content that research infrastructures produce and assemble. Work within both #dariahTeach and PARTHENOS confirmed a demand for reusable content that allows course providers to integrate the materials as they see fit within university programs. Research infrastructures might further this by developing a systematic approach to monitoring the use of any training materials by course instructors, and feeding this back into their development, instigating a culture in which educational materials are not just shared but quality-assured and, indeed, rewarded.

Research infrastructures can support higher education institutes by continuing to create and maintain essential filtering and contextualizing layers for training materials to coordinate and enhance open educational resources while ensuring that these resources are appropriate for use in a structured higher education curriculum context. Within DARIAH, the recent development of DARIAH-Campus, which aims to “capture and consolidate” DARIAH training materials, will assist with this aim by making the materials more discoverable, higher quality, more user-friendly, and increasingly reusable. At the same time, higher education institutions can come to view the research infrastructures as partners not just in research but teaching, feeding back experiences and requirements, and seeking unforeseen synergies and unexpected outcomes. The transformation of the DARIAH-Campus Event Capturer template into an experimental overlay journal for young researchers participating in face-to-face training events was one such unexpected outcome of a DARIAH workshop with educators, and more collaborative work can only lead to further such mutual benefit (Université de Neuchâtel, “Sharing the Experience”).

Research infrastructures, while stable, do not remain static. Because of their scale, complexity, and proximity to changes in policy and technology, they present a set of opportunities and constraints different from those found in higher education institutions. Their flexible nature, transnational focus, and ability to conduct discipline-sensitive foresight and to foster not just research-led but research-facing training should become an essential complement to how we see postgraduate training in the twenty-first century, especially in such hybrid, interdisciplinary, and technologically enabled fields as the digital humanities. DARIAH is laying the groundwork for just such an innovation, for the good of its users, its members, and its institutional partners. More than anything, though, this transformation of education will see our students better informed, prepared, and grounded for research and work, a truly worthy goal in a context where the potential reach and contribution of the humanities is all too often misunderstood.

Notes

1. 1. The “DARIAH Strategic Plan 2019–2026” was published in 2019, providing a seven-year plan for DARIAH and identifying key areas for development. This document is available from https://www.dariah.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Strategic-Plan_2019-2026.pdf, accessed April 22, 2024.

2. 2. Digital Humanities Course Registry (DHCR). https://dhcr.clarin-dariah.eu/, accessed April 18, 2024.

3. 3. #dariahTeach (https://teach.dariah.eu) was launched in March 2017 as part of an Erasmus+ funded project.

4. 4. The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, otherwise known as ECTS, is a system whereby credits are awarded based on the amount of student effort measured in time. For example, 1 ECTS is the equivalent of 25–30 hours of student effort. This includes time spent in lectures and seminars as well as self-directed learning. A short course that claims 5 ECTS is around 125–150 hours of student effort.

5. 5. The PARTHENOS Training Suite (https://training.parthenos-project.eu/).

6. 6. DARIAH Campus (https://campus.dariah.eu) is a discovery platform and hosting framework for free, open online training and learning resources in the digital humanities from the DARIAH community and beyond.

7. 7. The European Summer School in Digital Humanities is held annually, running for approximately two weeks. It has been running since 2009 and was originally devised by Elisabeth Burr at the University of Leipzig (“European Summer University Culture and Technology,” https://esu.culintec.de). It has since been taken over by Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (https://web.archive.org/web/20240305005019/https://esu-ct.conference.ubbcluj.ro/, accessed April 18, 2024). The University of Helsinki’s annual Digital Humanities Hackathon, meanwhile, has been running since 2015 (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/digital-humanities/helsinki-digital-humanities-hackathon).

8. 8. The first Lexical Data Masterclass took place in Berlin in 2017. For an overview of student projects, see https://digilex.hypotheses.org/386, accessed April 22, 2024. The second iteration took place in 2018, and an overview of student projects is available at https://digilex.hypotheses.org/551, accessed April 22, 2024. The third iteration, which was planned for spring 2020, was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

9. 9. This quote was taken from the European Commission’s call for TNA fellowships, 2016–19. Unfortunately, as this was a funding call, the documentation that this quote was taken from is no longer available from the European Commission’s website.

10. 10. A full assessment of this program can be found in Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure, “CENDARI Project Deliverable,” http://www.cendari.eu/sites/default/files/CENDARI_D3.2%20-%20Access%20Outcomes%20Report_Final.pdf.

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