1. Open Access to Humanities Data —
a scholarly perspective
Laurent Romary
Inria — French national research center
in computer science
Humboldt University Berlin

2. Personal background
• Former chair of the TEI council and current chair of ISO
committee TC 37/SC 4 (language resources)
– Importance of standards for a sustainable digital
humanities landscape
• Advisor for scientific information at Inria
– Deposit mandate issued in Jan. 2013
• Director of DARIAH — European e-infrastructure in the
arts and humanities
– Facilitating the deployment of digital methods and content
in the humanities

3. Context
• Huge progress on open access to publications
– Increasing role of publication repositories — cf. TARA at
TCD
– Towards new publication models (from blogs to epi-
journals)
• Sharing data in the humanities is not the mainstream
(yet)
– We need to understand why in order to take action
• Scholarly reluctance, lack of recognition, missing
technical infrastructure?

4. Is it wise to openly share Humanities data?
• Why would it be unwise?
– Data can be “stolen” by other scholars
• Is there a risk that other scholar carry out the same research?
– People could sell the data, publish it?
• WTH, as long as it does not prevent data to be freely available
elsewhere
• A sensible issue: digital editions, in depth annotations
– Early scholarly recognition
– Competition with traditional publication means
• Scholars still promise a book in their project applications
• Is it wise not to openly share humanities data?
… whenever it is possible

5. What benefits accrue from open access to
Humanities data for researchers, and for citizen?
• Pooling scholarly results
– Avoid duplication of work on primary sources
• Comparing and checking result
– Towards more evidence in the humanities
• Showing that hard work is being done
– Cf. more visibility to humanities research in the
wide public
• Humanities data are cultural heritage data
– General public interest

6. If this data is made available online for
free, who is funding this free access?
• This is usually not an issue in other scientific fields
– Scientific data management as part of research
infrastructures
– Open access is just a dimension of the infrastructure
• Devil’s advocate
– There could be some nice business to be made with
cultural heritage data…
– But is this our business?
• Facing the reality
– We may have to pay archives, libraries or publishers…. Or
maybe not.

7. Is open access to Humanities data
sustainable?
• A general technical question for digital
information
– Legibility: standards
– Preservation: long term archiving
– Technical availability and access
• A possible model: the library
– Open access to humanities data as part of the
scientific information services within universities, etc.
• A need for a long-term strategy within
institutions

8. What sort of use and re-use is made of
shared Humanities data?
• Why would we care?
– Commercial re-use
– Diverted interpretations
– Bad scholarly practices in general
• A general trust in scholarly principles
– Going digital has not changed human nature
– Scholars need attribution (and thus recognition) — CC-BY as a
baseline
• Greg Crane:
“I consider open data to be essential for emerging digital
scholarship - researchers must be free to download, analyze,
annotate, modify, and then republish their textual sources. ”

9. What are the major challenges of sharing
Humanities data?
• Systemic change in practices in the humanities
– Technical infrastructure
• We need more structures like the DRI
– Cultural change
• Scholarly fame and the “book”
– Political evolution (funding agencies, assessment
panels, recruiting panels and academies)
• Recognition of digital scholarly acheivements

10. Humanities data manifesto?
• Scholarly editions of primary sources are an
essential component of the research process
in the humanities
• Digital editions should be published as early as
possible and be taken into account in the
assessment of scholarly achievements
• Traditional publishing in print should be
accompanied by an openly accessible online
version