Infrastructure and User Services
The CLARIAH-NL infrastructure is the Dutch representation of the CLARIN and DARIAH ERICs, supporting diverse research in linguistics, digital humanities, media, literature, historians and historical social science. It provides access to datasets, advanced tools, and secure environments for data analysis and exploration through various facilities and services. Key CLARIN-NL components include online applications for lexicons, software and services to bring corpora online, linguistic search for large annotated text corpora, linguistic annotation and evaluation for historical Dutch (GaLAHaD), the Language Archive, tools for text annotation and web services for automatic speech processing. Key DARIAH-NL components include Linked Open Data, tools for creating and querying this data (e.g., grlc, burgerLinker), and datasets for analyzing long-term trends in human behavior (e.g., HSNDB.nl resources). The Media Suite Course Registry and the CLARIAH SSHOC-NL training program aims to help university lecturers, and students using the available digital collections and tools. KNAW-DANS, KNAW-HuC, KB National Library, Sound & Vision and hosts of PDI-SSH projects closely collaborate to provide services such as Data Stations, FAIR deposit pipelines, extensive digital textual collections, the Media Suite, and Twitter repositories, together with generic multimodal annotation tools, including speech recognition, computer vision, OCR/HTR, tools for linguistic analysis, editorial tools, workflows for processing person names, historical places, secure environments for working with protected data, and 3D modeling instruments.
Examples/description of the type of research
The CLARIAH research infrastructure enables scholars from different disciplines - ranging from linguists, to economic and cultural historians to media scholars to perform (interdisciplinary) research with innovative tools and scalable data. It encourages trans- and cross-media research into themes such as societal representation, gender, migration, public discourse, and class, from the 17th century to the present day. The infrastructure supports both quantitative and qualitative explorations, as it allows researchers to zoom in (close reading and other traditional humanities methods) and to zoom out (distant reading and other digital humanities methods). The design of the infrastructure allows for a data and tool criticism approach, enabling scholars to ethically reflect on the advantages and pitfalls of research with digital data and methods, such as possible bias in cultural heritage data collections. In addition, the infrastructure supports new types of enhanced publications, including data stories and 3D publications. The CLARIAH infrastructure is expanding its scope by integrating data and tools from both CLARIAH and ODISSEI in the SSHOC-NL project. This enhancement facilitates research into complex and urgent societal issues from sociological, cultural, and historical perspectives.
How to access the infrastructure?
Much of the infrastructure and data are openly accessible and available for use by anyone. To manage access to research applications and datasets securely, the infrastructure uses federated authentication and authorization mechanisms like SURFconext and SRAM. Initially, these protocols were applied to protect closed datasets with privacy or copyright restrictions, ensuring compliance with legal and ethical standards. Recognizing the need for better infrastructure usage tracking and enhanced security, these mechanisms are being implemented more broadly. This extension simplifies login processes, improves user activity monitoring, and ensures consistent security measures, fostering a secure and efficient research environment.
