Official launch of CLARIAH-VL with European support

Although our ‘CLARIAH-VL: Advancing the Open Humanities Service Infrastructure’ project started in February 2021, it wasn’t until Friday 10^th of September that we were finally able to organize our internal launch meeting. Obviously we have had many virtual meetings in the past months, but we were all looking forward to seeing each other in person, to reflect on the work that has been done so far and to look ahead to the many challenging tasks that are planned in the coming months and years.

We chose the KBR Royal Library of Belgium as the location for our launch meeting. KBR is the national scientific library and preserves, manages and studies more than 8 million documents. Before starting the actual meeting, the project team was happy to catch up over a cup of coffee in the beautiful Consilium meeting space.

As a starter, an interactive group exercise was planned to think about how we want to demonstrate the value of our integrated Open Humanities Service Infrastructure by the end of the project in December 2024. To introduce new members to the project and to reminisce ourselves of the working plan, we discussed the following issues: What do we need? What do we hope our infrastructure will look like? How should we brand our services? How can we improve our communication? Every team member approach and thought about these questions from the perspective of their own service infrastructure components (SIC’s):

• Aggregating Humanities Research Data Sets
• Linked (Open) Humanities Data Tool Suite
• User-driven platforms for data enrichment
• Digital Text Analysis Pipeline
• Outreach, Uptake & Sustain

After a short break, we discussed the next steps based on the output of the interactive group exercise and decided on the agenda for our next team meeting. Then it was time to welcome two guests for a European Intermezzo: Franciska de Jong (Executive Director of CLARIN-ERIC) and Toma Tasovac (Director of DARIAH-ERIC). Both stressed the importance of the work of the CLARIAH consortium in Flanders, and also the potential to collaborate within the European context.

We concluded this launch meeting with a small reception at the Albert Bar, a rooftop terrace at KBR, and with the promise to see each other soon during our collaborations in the next phase of the development of the CLARIAH-VL services.

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