NWO awards 13.8 million euro to CLARIAH PLUS
On Thursday 12 April, the humanities consortium of over 20 institutions, led by Huygens ING, was awarded EUR 13.8 million to develop CLARIAH PLUS, a national digital infrastructure for the humanities.
Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven of Education, Culture and Science announced this on behalf of the NWO as part of the National Roadmap for Large-Scale Scientific Infrastructures. The award was received on behalf of a national consortium of universities and humanities institutes by the Principal Investigator (PI) Lex Heerma van Voss, director of the Huygens ING.
CLARIAH PLUS is the only National Infrastructure from the social sciences and humanities that has been awarded funding. All other honoured applications fall into the category STEM or Life.
Heerma van Voss: ‘This award is a confirmation of the great importance of the CLARIAH infrastructure for the humanities in the Netherlands and far beyond. This infrastructure will change the character of humanities and social science research in a fundamental way.
European infrastructure
In the past four years the consortium has laid the foundations of the CLARIAH infrastructure in the CLARIAH CORE project. Because the CLARIAH infrastructure is an integral part of the European CLARIN and DARIAH initiatives, the Netherlands plays a leading role internationally in the development of a European infrastructure for the Humanities. Thanks to this award, the Netherlands will be able to consolidate and further expand this role in the coming years.
Also philosophy and theology
CLARIAH CORE focused specifically on linguistics, socio-economic history and media studies. In CLARIAH PLUS infrastructure is added for disciplines that study texts not in terms of the language used, but in terms of content, such as literature, history, but also philosophy and theology. A large number of current projects will benefit from these new investments, such as Golden Agents, Amsterdam Time Machine and Virtual Interiors as Interfaces for Big Historical Data Research.
CLARIAH consortium
The consortium behind this project that has committed to CLARIAH for the next ten years consists of Huygens ING, the Institute for Dutch Language, the International Institute of Social History (IISG), the National Library of the Netherlands, the Meertens Institute, the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. In addition, the following institutions are participating: Data Archiving and Network Services (DANS), Fryske Akademie, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), National Archives, Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Netherlands eScience Center, Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD), Radboud University, University of Groningen, Leiden University, Maastricht University, Utrecht University, University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit.
