Reflection of a broad field of activity
DANS takes part in numerous projects with the aim of promoting the scientific data infrastructure in the Netherlands and Europe. Sometimes as project leader, on other occasions as main contractor, and yet again as sub-contractor or supplier of a specific service.
These projects are financed in a variety of ways. For example, DANS cooperates in projects for which subsidy has been requested from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Senter Novem or the European Union, but also partly or fully finances other projects from its own budget. DANS’ contribution to a project can vary from the supply of ICT services to mapping the data needs within an entire discipline.
This page offers concise information on the projects in which DANS works or cooperates as well as the name of the contact person for each project. He or she will be happy to provide you with further information.
A number of projects have not yet been documented, but this page will be updated within the near future to ensure a complete overview.
To facilitate exchange of research data between researchers and to give them the opportunity to store their data in a safe and permanent manner, DANS developed the Electronic Archiving System. This system has been online since February 2007 and is being constantly improved by the DANS development team.
This project aims at generating a cost model for archiving and disseminating digital scholarly datasets relevant to the circumstances of DANS. It is a follow-up of the work done by Kevin Heerema and Anna Palaiologk, which resulted in a first draft cost model based mainly on the OAIS reference model. It is anticipated that the new and improved model will assist the management of DANS in achieving economic sustainability. Material costs need more attention, but the most challenging task in the new project is implementation of the model described within the organisation, in particular in the current time reporting systems and other planning tools.
A few years ago, NWO awarded subsidies to four university projects for lifting the information from the so-called Malta excavations to a higher scientific interpretation level. During these commercial excavations, as carried out within the framework of the new archaeological legislation, there often is insufficient time and space to arrive at a scientific synthesis. Four universities will now get the chance to integrate this so-called 'Harvest of Malta' to one coherent view of the past.
The PersID initiative is designed to guarantee durable access to digital scientific and cultural heritage.
A linguistically annotated and segmented database of the Old Testament is accessible to researches via the web. Created by Professor Eep Talstra and his WIVU team, this database holds the complete text of the Hebrew Bible in the original languages of Classical Hebrew and Aramaic, in such form that it is possible to search for occurrences of grammatical patterns. The Workgroup Informatics at the Free University of Amsterdam (WIVU) is part of the faculty of theology.
How did knowledge circulate in the 17th-century Dutch Republic? A team of historians, literature researchers, linguists and computer scientists has started to answer this question in the project Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-century Dutch Republic. A Web-based Humanities’ Collaboratory on Correspondences. This project, called CKCC Geleerdenbrieven (i.e., scholarly letters) for short, is carried out thanks to a NWO Medium investment subsidy.
In which way do scientific researchers make use of geodata? Which geodata do researchers need to perform even better research? What do researchers produce in terms of geodata? To what degree do researchers exchange geodata? This is a selection of the questions that were addressed in the project 'Inventory Geodata'.
In this project, an infrastructure is constructed within which different sources with information of municipalities are integrated. It enables researchers to search quickly and simply for information regarding various municipalities in several years. The challenge for this project is to create central access to data sets that are distributed across countries and have different structures.
Lack of cooperation and the absence of a technical information infrastructure forms an obstacle to humanities research in the battle for resources to succesully compete with the other science. The project initiators of Alfalab tend to improve this situation by bringing different groups and disciplines within the humanities together, with the aim of developing a common digital infrastructure. That digital infrastructure may take the form of a digital portal and a virtual laboratory (Research Area) for alphas, or short: Alfalab.
Objective of DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) is to realize a European digital repository infrastructure. Within the DRIVER II project, DANS cooperates with a number of other Dutch organizations on a work package that investigates and demonstrates the possibilities of Enhanced Publications.
DANS Subsidy for Small Data Projects
Small data projects can focus on describing one or more important data sets and making them accessible. They can also be feasibility studies or explorations in the field of data-to-data archiving in a new area, discipline or data format. But projects can also be pilots on new ways to archive or make research data accessible.
Since 2006 DANS has organised application rounds for the submission of proposals for these small data projects. In that year a budget of 50,000 Euro was made available which from 2007 onwards has be increased to 100.000 Euro a year. The maximum budget per project application is 10,000 Euro (including VAT if applicable).
The subsidies for small data projects are mostly targeted on sub-areas in which there are at presently gaps in the field of archiving, and which are of particular importance to DANS’ strategy. This way we can respond directly to signals from the field that may result from inventories held by DANS.
Have you got ideas for small data projects or do you believe there is a large gap in your field where archiving is concerned? Then please feel free to invite a DANS staff member to discuss these problems with you. Aside from providing subsidies, DANS could also be of use to you by, for instance, deploying personnel to specific archiving projects.
For more information please contact DANS.
Contact: Gaithrie Ganesh T +31(0)70 3446 484 E gaithrie.ganesh [at] dans.knaw.nl
The digitization of important additional private documents as complementary source material pertaining to the oral history AV data sets of the project War Love Child (funded by Ministry of Health Welfare and Sport as part of Heritage of War, Witnesses Accounts) which were deposited at DANS end 2009. This KDP project contains a wealth of material that support and illustrate the stories of respondents, such as birth certificates, engagement cards from their military father and Indonesian mother, diaries, declarations on marital status, personal correspondence, photographs, documents from orphanages where the children grew up, data on the search for the father's, etc. These personal documents are additional data sets to the interviews and transcriptions deposited at DANS in 2009.
This project responds to the growing interest, both internationally and nationally, to data visualization as a means to better understand research data. It lies in the expectation that new, more visual, methods for presenting data in the future will also prove to be important for the provision of research material in the data archives of DANS. This project aims to experiment with visualization of data in a dataset so to gain experience for future developments.
The project ‘Coupling between training classifications’ integrated a number of common training classifications in one database. The development of the database was carried out by the Researchcentrum voor Onderwijs en Arbeidsmarkt (ROA) and financed by the DANS KDP Fund.
The Labor Demand Panel of the Institute for Labour Studies (OSA), is a longitudinal panel survey among offices of Dutch companies and institutions. Thanks to extra financing from the DANS KDP Fund, this unique file was made accessible to a larger group of researchers.
Owing to a subsidy from the DANS KDP Fund, a large and important panel file with data on approximately 7500 pupils and consisting of more than thirty data files in a user-friendly manner was made available for secondary analysis.
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