Why now?

A great deal of mapping already happens, and each initiative sets its own boundaries on what to include. A remit is also necessary since no resource can conceivably hold everything, and a boundary is what allows one to be finished, kept up to date and compared with others. That remit, however, has often been set by considerations that have little to do with the distinctive make-up of the arts and humanities themselves. For example, who funds the work, how costly a facility is, and whether it counts as nationally significant. As Sheila Anderson has argued (2013), funders have made the case for research infrastructure in the language of innovation, competition and success; she asks instead that we “foreground the ‘research’ in ‘research infrastructures’”.

UKRI’s landscape analysis of UK research and innovation infrastructure, describing 2018 and 2019, was, in its own words, “not seeking to capture or explore regional or local needs for infrastructure”, and it observed that some of our disciplines are “less familiar with using the term ‘infrastructure’ to describe what they offer”. In Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy has called for “a National Database of Research Infrastructures”, noting that the existing national inventory records equipment worth €100,000 or more; the new national programme promises “a central equipment access portal”. At the European level, the MERIL portal of research infrastructures remains online but is “no longer able to process new or updated RI entries”. The ESFRI Roadmap, meanwhile, lists only infrastructures “of pan-European relevance”: a proposal has to be put forward at national level, with political support from the ministries of at least three countries and funding committed by at least two (ESFRI 2024). Its entries for the social sciences and humanities are a small number of large European consortia, CLARIN and DARIAH among them.

In practice, this means that small, regional, community-run, and practice-based realities inevitably fall between the lines, and those capturing and mapping the landscape (us included) build their own categories, workflows, and metadata, oftentimes without the chance to compare notes. A case in point is close to home. London’s Cultural Infrastructure Map warns that, after changes to its definitions, “the 2019 and 2023 datasets aren’t directly comparable”.

Needless to say, we are not the first to think about this. The Research Data Alliance once ran an interest group on mapping the landscape of data infrastructures; colleagues at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities are building a Wikibase of digital humanities centres, networks, and associations; the DH Course Registry, the SSH Open Marketplace and the International GLAM Labs Community each keep a living record of one part of the picture. What we could not find is a place where people doing this work for the arts, humanities, and cultural heritage across these islands can discuss and implement current practices, while sharing concerns, doubts, and hopes for the future of the sector.

Infrastructure rests, heavily (and thankfully!), on relationships: first and foremost, between people, but also across projects, practices, and data. Initiatives such as ScholarTHON, a collaborative two-day event on thematic research questions within arts, humanities, and cultural heritage, offer a tangible example of what becomes possible when these different elements come together and inform one another, opening up ways of working and developing new approaches. Making the landscape visible matters, but so does creating spaces in which the people and projects that constitute it can recognise one another, exchange knowledge, and shape its future together. We hope that DIAHCH can help us achieve this.

Who we are

DIAHCH is convened by three projects, each describing infrastructure from a different angle:

• Mapping the Arts and Humanities (School of Advanced Study, University of London) maps the ‘bodies’: more than 4,000 research centres, networks, societies, associations, and labs across the UK.
• Data/Culture builds human-centred digital research infrastructure for the arts and humanities. Its website, Data/Culture Portal, is a discovery tool that connects datasets, software, and researchers; the project also runs skills-building events.
• DARIAH-IE is the Irish node of DARIAH, the European digital research infrastructure for the arts and humanities, coordinated by Trinity College Dublin with partners that include universities, libraries, museums and the Digital Repository of Ireland.

The convenors are Elena Zolotariov (Liaison Officer, MAHP), Giovanna Di Martino (Community and Project Manager, Data/Culture, University of Oxford) and Joan Murphy (National Manager, DARIAH-IE).

As Joan puts it:

Ireland’s research community is small enough that everyone seems to know everyone, yet much of our infrastructural knowledge lives on the hard drives, and in the heads, of a few individuals. In a landscape of project-based funding and precarious contracts, the vulnerability of that knowledge-base cannot be overstated. DIAHCH gives us a chance to change this by giving us a space to connect Irish and UK colleagues undertaking infrastructure work – supporting us to engage with one another as a connected community rather than a scatter of individuals or projects.

What we plan to do

• Meet. The wider group will come together online every two months, starting on Tuesday 15 December 2026, 10:30 to 11:30.
• Connect. In January 2027, we are planning a winter colloquium: a full day, in person, to talk about what “infrastructure” means to the people who build, use, and look after it. Pencil Tuesday 26 January 2027 into your calendars. Coordinates to be declassified in due course 🤫
• Read. Describing Infrastructure, a termly reading group led by Giovanna, takes one project’s metadata schema and a handful of readings each session and asks what the description leaves in and what it leaves out.
• Edit. We are planning a community edit-a-thon on how infrastructures are described: metadata, classification and shared vocabularies. Stay tuned for more!
• Show up. We will be at the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association’s Regional Event with DARIAH-IE at Trinity College Dublin on 4 March 2027. Come and find us!

We would rather build the agenda with the people who join than announce it in advance, which is why the sign-up form asks what you would like the group to do.

Who is it for?

Anyone who makes, runs, describes or depends on infrastructure for the arts, humanities, and cultural heritage: researchers, research software engineers, and data stewards, librarians, archivists and curators, people who manage centres, labs and collections, and those who keep community archives and networks going in their own time. You do not need to call what you do “infrastructure” (many of us did not), and you do not need to be a member of the Association to take part. We are especially keen to hear from under-represented locations across Ireland and the UK, and from outside universities.

Join us

• 🤝 Join DIAHCH: sign-up form
• 📚 Join the reading group: Describing Infrastructure form
• 🗺️ Read more: DIAHCH on the Association’s website
• 📥 Get in touch: eleni.zolotariof@sas.ac.uk

Image: women working at a Bell System international telephone switchboard. U.S. National Archives (86-WWT-28-3), via Wikimedia Commons. No known copyright restrictions.