In the following videos Sally Chambers (DARIAH-BE & GHENT Center of Digital Humanities), Esther de Smet (Senior research policy advisor at Ghent University), Petra Drenth (EHRI & PARTHENOS), Suzanne Dumouchel (DARIAH), Arjan van Hessen (CLARIAH) Steven Krauwer (CLARIN ERIC) and Toma Tasovac (DARIAH-RS) convey their understanding of outreach and impact both of individual research and of research infrastructures. They illustrate important notions, give authentic examples and make some criticism of impact (assessment). Last, but not least, they talk about barriers and future developments of research infrastructures in the field of Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage Institutions. The videos result from interviews conducted with the aforementioned experts in the fields of research infrastructures and/or impact.
As national coordinator of the Belgian DARIAH branch (DARIAH-BE) and digital research coordinator of the Ghent Center for Digital Humanities (Ghent University), Sally Chambers reflects on how to bring digital enabled research into the faculties of Arts and Philosophy and beyond and how to link this to research infrastructures and research data management.
Esther de Smet gives several vivid examples that underline aspects of societal and research impact related to research infrastructures, especially in the context of a university. For her work the societal impact plays an important role for which Ghent University has set up and is using several research infrastructures.
As a communications officer, Petra Drenth reflects on the main challenges concerning the outreach of a Research Infrastructure (RI), the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). She explains that outreach is seldom something you create consciously, but that it should always be a consideration in the back of your mind.
As a member of the DARIAH coordination office as programme implementation officer and Digital Humanities researcher, Suzanne Dumouchel reflects on the relationship between impact and outreach especially for European research infrastructures. While outreach often stays at the surface, but is a necessary and very valuable part of a research infrastructures work and means to reach its stakeholders, impact is more difficult to create and measure as it aims at changing people’s way of understanding or doing things.
Arjan van Hessen is affiliated to the University of Twente as a researcher and to the University of Utrecht as a member of the CLARIAH board. Furthermore, he embodies an intersection between academic and business environment as he also works for a software company. In this video he promotes an approach of impact and impact measurement that relies on the actual usage of a research infrastructure.
In this video Steven Krauwer, one of the founding members of CLARIN, reflects on challenges concerning Outreach for research infrastructure (RI). Using practical examples from his own experience – both from the RI management as well as from the RI user perspective – he provides insight in the things a research infrastructure provider should bear in mind, as well as the features which he, as an RI user, finds valuable.
In this video, Toma Tasovac, Director of the Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities, National Coordinator of DARIAH-RS, Chair of the National Coordinators’ Committee at DARIAH-EU, member of the digital research infrastructure ELEXIS and enthusiastic lexicographer, promotes the benefits of outreach and throws a critical glance at impact and impact measurement.