Once a year, all fifteen partners that make up the PARTHENOS consortium meet to discuss the project’s progress and to plan forthcoming activities. This year’s General Assembly took place in Krakow, Poland on 12 July and was preceded by a Steering Committee meeting and a working session of the PARTHENOS teams that work on user requirements and common policies.
The PARTHENOS meetings coincided with the Digital Humanities 2016 (DH2016) conference which was held at Krakow from the 11th to 16th July. PARTHENOS took full advantage of this latter event by displaying a poster and making leaflets available on the booth of partner and fellow Research Infrastructure CLARIN where DH2016 delegates could inform themselves about the project and its outcomes and by organising a host of smaller meetings between PARTHENOS representatives and other related Research Infrastructures such as DARIAH and CLARIN to co-ordinate activities.
Significant progress
The General Assembly was chaired by Franco Niccolucci, co-ordinator of PARTHENOS, and the presentations given by the leaders of the project’s eight work areas demonstrated that PARTHENOS is on track and has made significant progress. Activities have started across the board, including the formulation of user requirements, the definition of common policies and standards, the development of a training plan, the semantic integration of resources and the development of a joint resource registry. DARIAH, the Research Infrastructure for Digital Humanities, was also formally accepted a as full partner in PARTHENOS.
Working together
What was particularly evident from the various presentations was how intensely the various project teams have collaborated over the course of the last year. As a large multi-national project, collaboration across institutions, countries and disciplinary areas is crucial if PARTHENOS is to achieve its aims, and an excellent start has been made in this regard. As Franco Niccolucci explained, these collaborations have largely occurred naturally and from the bottom-up, and they will ensure that all PARTHENOS activities and products will form a coherent and integrated whole.
First results
PARTHENOS is a four year project running from May 2015 to April 2019, and many of its most significant results will become available in the second half of the project. However, a range of concrete products will be published over the coming months, including
- A Standard Survival Kit which will take the form of an interactive website that will allow researchers to get concise information about applicable standards relevant to their work and guide them in the usage of those standards
- A Research Infrastructure 101 which will be offered as an online training module. This module will be targeted at novices in the world of Research Infrastructure, and offer jargon-free introductions to key concepts such as data and metadata, standards, ontologies, data management and intellectual property rights.
- An online wizard that provides information about policies for the management and assessment of research data.
As always, we will of course keep you informed about the progress of these and similar activities.