Project: Digital Methods Platform for Arts and Humanities (DiMPAH)

More about the project

As European research moves towards new mission-based partnerships addressing complex, global challenges, Higher Education (HE) institutions and HE programmes must also help create challenge-based impact and future solutions. The insight is growing that in future Arts and Humanities (A&H) will contribute even more strongly towards development based on human-centeredness, i.e., creating stronger focus on users, citizens, audiences and customers, consequently strengthening socio-economic impact, connectedness, and inclusion across Europe.

This also implies negotiating our common digital transition, further contributing to long-term digital capacity building within A&H and fostering this into knowledge and competence for telling new stories for Europe. DiMPAH aims to aggregate, connect and make widely available novel Open Education Resources (OERs) on selected digital methods, apply these to interdisciplinary contexts and foster novel creative learning experiences by taking data from the past into future stories.

Digital Methods Platform for Arts and Humanities (DiMPAH) has three objectives:

• a) Create novel OERs on digital methods and associated tools for the construction of new knowledge on A&H research questions and for audience engagement in a suite across the complementary areas of qualitative and quantitative digital research tools and methods and providing access to A&H resources for i) information access through knowledge organization systems, and ii) user engagement via Augmented Reality (AR) of cultural heritage. The OERs will be accompanied by an interactive book to ease the introduction of teachers, trainers, and learners into the digital methods, across disciplines. The DiMPAH suite, channeled by the #dariahTeach platform, will be openly available across European institutions to support current and future professionals from cultural heritage sectors as well as academia in improving competencies, connecting best practices and applying spearheading technologies, to enable collective efforts towards future solutions.
  
  
• b) The DiMPAH-selected methods are to be applied and tested via case studies in three prominent European digital heritage contexts: a) digitised newspaper collections; b) built heritage environments and their digital twins; and, c) performing arts collections.
  
  
• c) DiMPAH will move this ‘towards new stories for Europe’: the selected new methods and technologies, and cultural heritage case studies, will be deployed in learning scenarios to localise and show possible solutions and potential impact on social equity, transnational and cultural diversity, gender equality, good health and well-being. Linnaeus University, Aarhus University, University of Amsterdam, University of La Rochelle, the University of Cyprus and University of Porto are contributing with their active researchers and university teachers who work in A&H as well as computer and media science. 

The project will encompass training participating partners on creating OERs for DARIAH Teach, creation and iterative testing of OERs, interactive book writing, and multiplier events, including one final Hackathon. The OERs will be developed through a number of steps including training, development and evaluation, applying iterative design principles: 1) all OER creators will receive training on OER development; 2) first prototypes will be developed and tested; 3) training based on updated prototypes will be provided; 4) three more rounds of development and testing will be implemented, each about six months apart. The project would ensure that OERs are following criteria of DARIAH Teach in terms of technical interoperability as well as quality of content and creating digital learning environments for engaging beyond campus partnerships. The accompanying interactive book will be written following the progress of the OER development.

Through OERs developed in this project, the European researcher will gain access to a one-stop shop for OERs on digital methods for A&H, as well as related disciplines in the interdisciplinary sphere of DH. In addition, teachers in HE institutions will be able to train their students by building on material created by highly experienced professionals in the field. Cultural heritage professionals will learn on how they could best apply digital methods such as Augmented Reality for engagement with audiences online and on-site. Ultimately, long term benefits can help Europe (and beyond) reach certain sustainability goals by allowing scholars to research digital content and datasets, such as cultural data from cultural heritage and art institutions, which are central to studying identity formation and social cohesion. Complex societal challenges can be addressed through international, cross-disciplinary, collaborative research into human conditions, societies and cultures, and through comprehensive studies using relevant digital methods and datasets throughout Europe and beyond.

Highlights

• IAMCR conference,11-15 july 2021, full paper “Women pop-political icons as memes in the American Election 2020”. Author: Pernilla Severson.
• International Society for the Linguistics of English conference, theme "Evolving English and the Digital Era”.
• Hadjistassou, S., Joannidou, S. , & Louca, P. (2021). Design-based research as a framework for developing and deploying Augmented Reality applications and scenarios for intercultural exchange. EUROCALL Conference. 
• Marianne Ping Huang. 2021. DARIAH Annual Meeting, See presentation
• Dimpah at Time Machine Organization’s (TMO) Webinar on Project Scouting and Third Parts Services, October 2020. See video (2 min).
• Argentinian-Polish congress about theatre, online, December 2020. Author: Cécile Chantraine Braillo. See video, from 6h3min38s (In Spanish).
• Event on Digital Humanities at La Rochelle University, November 2020. Author: Cécile Chantraine Braillon and Antoine Doucet. See video (in French).
• DiMPAH in the iSchools news
• DiMPAH at timemachine.eu