FREEZE! A manifesto for safeguarding and preserving born-digital heritage

Finding ways to preserve born-digital heritage has become a matter of urgency and growing concern. Websites, games and interactive documentaries each bring specific challenges that need to be addressed. It takes three to tango: Ensuring that our digital lives and digital creativity are not lost to future generations requires a joint effort by the principal players: creators, heritage professionals and policy makers. This manifesto lays out the actions they need to take today to safeguard born-digital heritage

Developing Data Stories as Enhanced Publications in Digital Humanities

This paper discusses the development of data-driven stories and the editorial processes underlying their production. Such ‘data stories’ have proliferated in journalism but are also increasingly developed within academia. Although ‘data stories’ lack a clear definition, there are similarities between the processes that underlie journalistic and academic data stories. However, there are also differences, specifically when it comes to epistemological claims. In this paper data stories as phenomenon and their use in journalism and in the Humanities form the context for the editorial protocol developed for CLARIAH Media Suite Data Stories

Data Stories in CLARIAH: Developing a Research Infrastructure for Storytelling with Heritage and Culture Data

Online stories, from blog posts to journalistic articles to scientific publications, are commonly illustrated with media (e.g. images, audio clips) or statistical summaries (e.g. tables and graphs). Such “illustrations” are the result of a process of acquiring, parsing, filtering, mining, representing, refining and interacting with data [3]. Unfortunately, such processes are typically taken for granted and seldom mentioned in the story itself. Although recently a wide variety of interactive data visualisation techniques have been developed (see e.g., [6]), in many cases the illustrations in such publications are static; this prevents different audiences from engaging with the data and analyses as they desire. In this paper, we share our experiences with the concept of “data stories” that tackles both issues, enhancing opportunities for outreach, reporting on scientific inquiry, and FAIR data representation [9]. In journalism data stories are becoming widely accepted as the output of a process that is in many aspects similar to that of a computational scholar: gaining insights by analyzing data sets using (semi-)automatized methods and presenting these insights using (interactive) visualizations and other textual outputs based on data [4] [7] [5] [6]. In the context of scientific output, data stories can be regarded as digital “publications enriched with or linking to related research results, such as research data, workflows, software, and possibly connections among them” [1]. However, as infrastructure for (peerreviewed) enhanced publications is in an early stage of development (see e.g., [2]), scholarly data stories are currently often produced as blog posts, discussing a relevant topic. These may be accompanied by illustrations not limited to a single graph or image but characterized by different forms of interactivity: readers can, for instance, change the perspective or zoom level of graphs, or cycle through images or audio clips. Having experimented successfully with various types and uses of data stories1 in the CLARIAH2 project, we are working towards a more generic, stable and sustainable infrastructure to create, publish, and archive data stories. This includes providing environments for reproduction of data stories and verification of data via “close reading”. From an infrastructure perspective, this involves the provisioning of services for persistent storage of data (e.g. triple stores), data registration and search (registries), data publication (SPARQL end-points, search-APIs), data visualization, and (versioned) query creation. These services can be used by environments to develop data stories, either or not facilitating additional data analysis steps. For data stories that make use of data analysis, for example via Jupyter Notebooks [8], the infrastructure also needs to take computational requirements (load balancing) and restrictions (security) into account. Also, when data sets are restricted for copyright or privacy reasons, authentication and authorization infrastructure (AAI) is required. The large and rich data sets in (European) heritage archives that are increasingly made interoperable using FAIR principles, are eminently qualified as fertile ground for data stories. We therefore hope to be able to present our experiences with data stories, share our strategy for a more generic solution and receive feedback on shared challenges

Hexabundles: imaging fiber arrays for low-light astronomical applications

We demonstrate a novel imaging fiber bundle ("hexabundle") that is suitable for low-light applications in astronomy. The most successful survey instruments at optical-infrared wavelengths use hundreds to thousands of multimode fibers fed to one or more spectrographs. Since most celestial sources are spatially extended on the celestial sphere, a hexabundle provides spectroscopic information at many distinct locations across the source. We discuss two varieties of hexabundles: (i) lightly fused, closely packed, circular cores; (ii) heavily fused non-circular cores with higher fill fractions. In both cases, we find the important result that the cladding can be reduced to ~2 μm over the short fuse length, well below the conventional ~10λ thickness employed more generally, with a consequent gain in fill factor. Over the coming decade, it is to be expected that fiber-based instruments will be upgraded with hexabundles in order to increase the spatial multiplex capability by two or more orders of magnitude

Fairness and transparency throughout a digital humanities workflow: Challenges and recommendations

How can we achieve sufficient levels of transparency and fairness for (humanities) research based on historical newspapers? Which concrete measures should be taken by data providers such as libraries, research projects and individual researchers? We approach these questions from the vantage point that digitised newspapers are complex sources with a high degree of heterogeneity caused by a long chain of processing steps, ranging, e.g., from digitisation policies, copyright restrictions to the evolving performance of tools for their enrichment such as OCR or article segmentation. Overall, we emphasise the need for careful documentation of data processing, research practices and the acknowledgement of support from institutions and collaborators