The HiTZ Center will lead the European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences CLARIAH-ES

The HiTZ Center of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) has made the CLARIAH-ES consortium join the existing European infrastructures CLARIN-ERIC, focused on digital data and processes related to language, and DARIAH-ERIC, focused on digital data and processes related to the digital humanities, Thanks to the work done in government strategic research networks Intel (RED2018-102797-E) and Claria-ES Network (RED2022-134527-E), funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation. CLARIAH-ES consists of an interdisciplinary group of experts in the humanities, social sciences, computer science, artificial intelligence and language technologies, among other disciplines. The current CLARIAH-ES consortium consists of the University of the Basque Country, the University of Santiago de Compostela, the University of Alicante, UNED, the National Center for Supercomputing, the Complutense University of Madrid, the University of Jaén, and the University. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the Supreme Council for Scientific Research and the Spanish National Library.

“In the current context of digital transformation, study, research and development in the humanities, arts and social sciences require scientific and technological infrastructures that allow the computational processing of textual, visual, numerical and/or audio data. These infrastructures promote multilingualism and interoperability.” “It allows us to overcome the fragmentation of research communities by increasing the impact of their research,” explains Dr. Germain Rigau-Claramont, Deputy Director of the HiTZ Center and Coordinator of the Research Infrastructure of CLARIAH-ES, Resource Maintenance and Reuse, Open Science, Visibility and Scientific Collaboration in Europe.

The HiTZ Center of the University of the Basque Country will include, as leader and coordinator of the proposal, the technical office CLARIAH-ES. “The tasks that researchers in this technical office contemplate include management and coordination tasks, infrastructure deployment (organizing talks, seminars, workshops, etc.), training researchers in the use of these infrastructures, and operational maintenance of the infrastructure (data, services, applications, etc.) , exploiting the infrastructure to provide support services to researchers, directing and clarifying requests from researchers to create new services and projects, developing them in a coordinated manner with the rest of the CLARIAH-ES contract, infrastructure expansion projects with new data or services, and developing new research projects at the regional, national, European or American level. Latin, etc.

As part of these infrastructures, researchers will have “access to unique European research facilities including standards, data, tools, computing and methods, communities of interest and European initiatives or projects. In this way, any government researcher will be able to access from his or her computer all the data, technology and infrastructure.” and resources to investigate in the cloud using the most advanced digital and artificial intelligence tools. The ultimate goal is to support and contribute to the management and coordination of the CLARIAH-ES infrastructure in order to effectively promote the digital transformation of research in the humanities and social sciences, as well as our strategic position in international projects and programmes. In The context of the European research area,” concludes Professor Germain Rigau.

The Basque node of this consortium is called CLARIAH-EUS (www.claria.eus) is an infrastructure proposal to promote research in Basque and Basque in the humanities and social sciences in cooperation with both European research infrastructures (CLARIN-ERIC and DARIAH-ERIC). The workshop organized at the San Telmo Museum (Donostia) aims to introduce CLARIAH-EUS to the research community and provide channels for participation. To this end, the institutions that made it possible and contributed to the infrastructure were invited to attend this workshop: the Basque Government, the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, the University of the Basque Country, and the HiTZ Center, as well as research. The community that contributed to the infrastructure.

The Regional Deputy for Economic Promotion and Strategic Projects of Gipuzkoa, Ani Insaosti, highlighted the project’s “valuable contribution” in different areas. “Both from a linguistic point of view, because it will contribute to the strengthening and status of the Basque language in the field of research; From the point of view of digital transformation and the integration of new technologies in this field; From a knowledge and learning point of view, because it will be an important support for our research talent in the field of humanities and social sciences; And finally, from an internationalization point of view, because it will connect us to the European research ecosystem, creating new opportunities.