Open Science grant awarded to Digital Humanities Lab

The scientific developers of the Utrecht Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) have been awarded a grant from the Open Science Fund. The main objective of the rewarded project is to make the past and future research software of DHLab as FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) as possible.

The Open Science Fund is an opportunity for Utrecht University and University Medical Centre Utrecht employees to access small grants with which they can apply Open Science principles into their research.

Over the eight years of its existence, the Digital Humanities Lab has collaborated with a great number of humanities scholars, which has led to an extensive and diverse portfolio of research software for text mining, language processing and visualization. Even though much of this software is publicly available, a substantial part does not yet adhere to all standards for FAIR software due to budget limitations. The aim of the ‘FAIRer DH Software project’ is to meet these important quality standards, thereby increasing the visibility and reusability of our research software.

The practice of making the research software repositories public, citable, more easily findable and reusable aligns with the overall mission of the DHLab to help researchers achieve greater digital literacy. By making their own digital methods more available, the lab encourages researchers to make use of them. In addition, the dissemination of the FAIRer DH Software project results will create more awareness of the importance of FAIR software standards.