Research Infrastructures
for the Digital Humanities

Huma-Num · DARIAH

Julien Rabaud

Applied Mathematics Research Library · UPPA Pôle Numérique · Research Data Management

2026-03-16

Introduction

What are Research Infrastructures?

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources, and services that are used by the research community to conduct research and foster innovation.

— European Commission

  • They can be physical (laboratories, telescopes) or digital (platforms, data repositories, services)
  • For the humanities, digital RIs provide tools to produce, share, and preserve research data
  • They are increasingly organised at European level, under the ESFRI roadmap

Why should doctoral students care?

  • Funding agencies (ANR, ERC, Horizon Europe) require Data Management Plans
  • Open access and open data are increasingly mandatory for publicly-funded research
  • These infrastructures provide free tools you may already need — or will need
  • They connect you to European research communities — especially valuable within UNITA
  • They offer training, workshops, and summer schools
  • Your data deposited through them will still be findable in 20 years

Think of research infrastructures as the library system of digital research: you don’t build it yourself, but knowing how to use it makes all the difference.

Four interconnected infrastructures

Huma-Num

Huma-Num
French national infrastructure
Your starting point

DARIAH

DARIAH-EU
Pan-European network
22 member states

CLARIN

CLARIN ERIC
Language resources
22 member states

CESSDA

CESSDA ERIC
Social science data
23 member states

→ All are EOSC members and co-develop the SSH Open Marketplace

Part 1 · Huma-Num

What is Huma-Num?

Huma-Num is a French Infrastructure de recherche « étoile » (IR*) dedicated to digital humanities. (source)

A IR* is a national designation by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. Huma-Num is supported and hosted by CNRS (UAR 3598).

  • Created in 2013 from TGE Adonis (est. 2006)
  • Provides tools, services, and community infrastructure for SSH researchers
  • France’s national node for DARIAH-EU (DARIAH-FR)
  • France is the host country of the DARIAH-ERIC secretariat

The Data Lifecycle

Huma-Num data lifecycle

Collect → Process → Store → Share

From raw data to open, reusable, FAIR research outputs — Huma-Num supports every stage.

FAIR Data Principles

🔍 F

Findable
Persistent identifiers (DOI, ARK) + rich metadata

🔓 A

Accessible
Open protocols, clear access conditions

🔗 I

Interoperable
Shared vocabularies, ontologies, open formats

♻️ R

Reusable
Clear licences, provenance documentation

→ Wilkinson et al. (2016), Scientific Data | go-fair.org

Key Services

Service What it does Link
NAKALA Deposit & publish FAIR research data (DOI identifiers) nakala.fr
Isidore Discover SSH publications & datasets isidore.science
Stylo Semantic text editor for academic writing stylo.huma-num.fr
Huma-Num Box Collaborative cloud storage (Nextcloud) box.huma-num.fr
Virtual Machines On-demand computing environments for projects huma-num.fr/services

Thematic Consortiums

Huma-Num structures its community through thematic consortiums (Consortiums-HN) — labelled for four-year periods, evaluated by the Scientific Council, max. 12 active at a time.

pictorIA — Visual corpora & AI (2024)
ARIANE — AI & digital scholarly editions (2023)
PTM — Geohistorical data & Time Machine (2023)
MASAplus — Archaeological data & Linked Open Data (2023)
DISTAM — Non-Latin scripts & area studies (2022)

CANEVAS — Video corpora annotation (2022)
MUSICA 2 — Musicology & digital music (2022)
CORLI 2 — Language corpora · CLARIN Centre-K (2022)
3DHN — 3D data for humanities & heritage (2024)

For doctoral students: one or more consortiums may be directly relevant to your dissertation. Connecting early gives access to community expertise, methodological guides, and training events.
🔗 huma-num.fr/les-consortiums-hn

Part 2 · DARIAH-EU

What is DARIAH?

DARIAH = Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities

  • European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) since August 2014
  • 22 Member States + cooperating partners
  • Host country: France (secretariat in Paris, managed by Huma-Num)
  • Mission: empowering arts & humanities research communities with digital methods to create, connect, and share knowledge about culture and society
  • Part of the ESFRI Roadmap of strategic European research infrastructures

Four Strategic Pillars

Research
Digital methods for arts & humanities — text analysis, data modelling, digital editions
Education & Training
Building digital skills across the community — DARIAH Campus, summer schools
Advocacy
Promoting open science and digital humanities in European research policy
Infrastructure
Developing and maintaining shared technical resources and interoperable services

Tools and Platforms

DARIAH Campus
Open training platform — courses, modules, and resources for digital arts and humanities
🔗 campus.dariah.eu

SSH Open Marketplace
Discover tools, workflows, datasets, and training materials for SSH research
🔗 marketplace.sshopencloud.eu

Working Groups
Thematic communities open to all researchers at member institutions:

  • Text & Data Analytics
  • Digital Methods (DiMPO)
  • Ethics & Legality (ELDAH)
  • Women Writers in History
  • DARIAH Teach

🔗 dariah.eu/working-groups

DARIAH and UNITA Countries

UNITA partner countries are connected to DARIAH in various capacities:

Country DARIAH status
🇫🇷 France Founding member · host country
🇮🇹 Italy Founding member
🇪🇸 Spain Member
🇵🇹 Portugal Member
🇷🇴 Romania Member
🇨🇭 Switzerland Cooperating partner (DARIAH-CH in progress)
🇺🇦 Ukraine Cooperating partner

→ Every UNITA partner country has a national node or cooperating structure. You are already connected.

Part 3 · EOSC & the European Landscape

What is EOSC?

The European Open Science Cloud is a flagship European Commission initiative: a federated environment for storing, sharing, and reusing research data across all disciplines.

  • Launched as a concept in 2016, operational since 2021
  • Brings together research infrastructures, data repositories, and service providers from across Europe
  • Governed by the EOSC Association — a legal entity grouping research organisations
  • For SSH research: DARIAH, CLARIN, and CESSDA are EOSC members and have integrated their services
  • Connects to national data strategies (Plan national pour la science ouverte, etc.)

EOSC for Humanities Researchers

  • Discoverability: your data deposited on NAKALA or via DARIAH/CLARIN nodes becomes searchable through the EOSC portal
  • Cross-disciplinary connections: find corpora, tools, and datasets alongside sciences
  • Persistent identifiers: EOSC promotes PID-based data (DOI, ARK, ORCID) — what Huma-Num already does
  • FAIR as a requirement: Horizon Europe grants increasingly require EOSC-compatible, FAIR data outputs

Think of EOSC as the European commons for research data — Huma-Num, DARIAH, CLARIN, and CESSDA are France and the SSH community’s contribution to that commons.

The SSH Open Marketplace

A shared discovery portal co-developed by DARIAH, CLARIN, and CESSDA — and integrated into EOSC.

What you can find:

Category Examples
Tools & Services Annotation tools, text editors, OCR
Training materials Tutorials, slides, course modules
Datasets Corpora, archives, digitised collections
Workflows Documented research method descriptions

🔗 marketplace.sshopencloud.eu

A Word on CLARIN & CESSDA

Two further SSH ERICs complete the picture, alongside DARIAH:

CLARIN ERIC — language resources & NLP

  • Historical newspaper corpora — Named Entity Recognition
  • Literary studies — stylometric analysis, text encoding (TEI)
  • Oral sources — spoken language corpora (via CORLI / Huma-Num)

🔗 clarin.eu

CESSDA ERIC — social science data archives

  • Surveys, censuses, electoral studies, panels
  • Data Catalogue — 40,000+ studies across Europe
  • DMEG — data management guide for SSH
  • French entry point: PROGEDO / CDSP (Sciences Po)

🔗 cessda.eu

The Full Picture

flowchart LR
    ESFRI["🇪🇺 ESFRI Roadmap"]
    EOSC["EOSC<br/>European Open Science Cloud"]
    DARIAH["DARIAH-EU<br/>ARTS & HUMANITIES"]
    CLARIN["CLARIN ERIC<br/>LANGUAGE"]
    CESSDA["CESSDA ERIC<br/>SOCIAL SCIENCE DATA"]
    MARKET["SSH Open<br/>Marketplace"]
    HN["Huma-Num 🇫🇷"]
    DARIAH_FR["DARIAH-FR"]
    CLARIN_FR["CLARIN-FR"]
    PROGEDO["PROGEDO 🇫🇷"]
    UPPA["UPPA · UNITA"]

    ESFRI --> DARIAH
    ESFRI --> CLARIN
    ESFRI --> CESSDA
    DARIAH <--> EOSC
    CLARIN <--> EOSC
    CESSDA <--> EOSC
    DARIAH --> MARKET
    CLARIN --> MARKET
    CESSDA --> MARKET
    HN --> DARIAH_FR --> DARIAH
    HN --> CLARIN_FR --> CLARIN
    PROGEDO --> CESSDA
    UPPA --> HN
    UPPA --> DARIAH
    UPPA -.-> CESSDA

What’s Next For You?

Practical Starting Points

  1. Deposit your data → NAKALA — FAIR, persistent, citable
  2. Find tools & workflows → SSH Marketplace
  3. Train yourself → DARIAH Campus
  4. Join a consortium → Huma-Num consortiums
  5. Find social science data → CESSDA Data Catalogue via PROGEDO
  6. Join a working group → DARIAH working groups
  7. Write your DMP → DMP OPIDoR with consortium guidance

All these services are free for researchers affiliated with European universities and research institutions.

Thank you

Questions?


Julien Rabaud
Applied Mathematics Research Library · UPPA
Pôle Numérique · Research Data Management

📧 julien.rabaud@univ-pau.fr
🔗 Companion site: https://ujubib.github.io/ed-huma-num-dariah