DANS is an institute of KNAW and NWO that provides services for long-term archiving and storage of research data. There are thousands of isolated data silos in the humanities such as historical databases, art collections, and linguistic corpora. The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is working to open up and connect these silos by building social and technical bridges to enable open sharing of data across technologies and disciplines. RDA brings together members in working groups to develop solutions like standards, best practices, and data citation methods to facilitate global data sharing and reproducibility of research findings.

1. www.dans.knaw.nl
DANS is an institute of KNAW and NWO
Digital humanities challenges and the
Research Data Alliance
Ingrid Dillo
DANS/RDA TAB
Panel session Digital Data Sharing:
Opportunities and Challenges of Opening Research
DH16, Krakow 15 July 2016

2. EASY: long-term Electronic
Archiving System for self-deposit
Core services
DataverseNL for
short/intrmediate
term storage

3. • Why are some regions in the world rich and others poor?
• Why is the negative representation of minorities so
persistent?
• How and why is language changing?

6. Thousands of data silos in the humanities
Historical
databases
Art image collections
Archeological GIS
Linguistic corpora
Textual corpora

7. Open up and connect the silos

9. Why not share?
• Those data are mine!
• Discredit my findings
• Still analyzing the data
• I cannot trust the data
produced somewhere else
..fear, distrust and a little bit of
laziness..

10. “Perhaps the biggest challenge in sharing data is
trust: how do you create a system robust enough for
scientists to trust that, if they share, their data
won’t be lost, garbled, stolen or misused?”

11. RDA: building social and technical bridges
RDA is building the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of
data to achieve its vision of researchers and innovators openly sharing data
across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges
of society.
Members come together through self-formed, volunteer, focussed
Working Groups, exploratory Interest Groups to exchange
knowledge, share discoveries, discuss barriers and potential
solutions, explore and define policies and test as well as harmonise
standards to enhance and facilitate global data sharing.
Reproducibility
Data preservation
Best practices for domain
repositories
Curriculum development
Data citation
Data type registries
Metadata
and so many more!

16. Output: solutions enabling cross platform discovery
based on existing open protocols and standards

17. Output: harmonised standard for core
certification of digital repositories

19. RDA Outputs

21. Thanks for listening!
For more information:
ingrid.dillo@dans.knaw.nl
https://rd-alliance.org
www.dans.knaw.nl