CDH awarded two FAIR Research IT Innovation Grants

The Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) has been awarded two FAIR Research IT Innovation Grants. These will allow the CDH to host its own server instance of 4CAT, a webbased toolkit enabling researchers and students to collect and process social media data in a well-secured virtual self-service setting, as well as the addition of a Named Entity Recognition functionality in I-Analyzer, a DHLab tool for searching and visualizing text corpora. The grants were awarded on 10 March, 2023, during a festive gathering in the Utrecht University Hall.

Utrecht University’s FAIR Research IT programme has the ambition to support every UU team in the field of research IT to comply their tools and services with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. The programme does this with existing and with tools, services and infrastructure to be developed. The FAIR Research IT Innovation Fund is one of the instruments to realize that ambition. As of this year, the fund awards annually a small grant of 25.000 euros ten times and a medium grant of 50.000 five times.

Grants awarded to the CDH

TextMiNER, developed by the Digital Humanities Lab, is the first project for which the CDH has received a small grant. This project enables a wide audience to browse and visualize a text corpus using Named Entity Recognition. This functionality will be integrated into I-Analyzer, an in-house tool for searching and visualizing text corpora.

The second small grant awarded to the CDH is for ‘4CAT: Capture and Analysis Toolkit’. This web-based toolkit enables researchers and students to collect and process social media data in a well-secured virtual self-service setting. The grant will allow the CDH to host its own server instance of this application to ensure UU users are adequately supported with the substantial computing power required.

In addition to these two projects, the CDH will be participating in a third project that has been awarded a small FAIR Research IT innovation grant: ‘An Interactive Geo-Spatial Platform for Modeling Jewish Historical Migration. This project aims to integrate the inscriptional database PEACE Portal, built by the Digital Humanities Lab, into an interactive platform documenting Jewish historical migration into Europe during the Roman and Medieval periods, and to make this data available for further research as linked open data in RDF format.