Digital History Advanced Research Projects Accelerator (DHARPA)

The Digital History Advanced Research Projects Accelerator (DHARPA) is an interdisciplinary team working to enable critical Digital Humanities practice.

The project at a glance

Start date:

01 Oct 2019
Duration in months:

59
Funding:

FNR Luxembourg
Principal Investigator(s):

Sean Takats

About

DHARPA (the Digital History Advanced Research Projects Accelerator) is developing a suite of interconnected software tools for historical research, in conjunction with a sustainable new lab dedicated to blue-sky research in digital history. The main software component is kiara, an open-source Python-based tool for humanities data orchestration. Kiara uses a modular approach that enables users to re-use analytical pipelines that have been developed by researchers, as well as create new ones from existing building blocks. Kiara helps to manage research data and augment it with automatically-, semi-automatically-, and manually- created metadata. Conceptually, DHARPA aims to move beyond datafication, enabling researchers to analyze and visualize their own datasets, and to reflect iteratively on the transformations and analytical operations they perform at each stage of their research. The team assesses the impact of technology on historical research, and it experiments with how technology can reshape the methodological underpinnings of history as a scientific discipline.

Led by Sean Takats, DHARPA’s team includes eight researchers, technical staff, students, and administrative support inside the C²DH. Their work supports several “accelerator projects”, allied research using varying tools and methodologies across the digital humanities. These projects evolve in dialog with DHARPA, helping the team to develop its roadmap and using the DHARPA software to contribute to project research objectives.

DHARPA also offers new insight into cultural heritage beyond the university context, providing opportunities for collaboration with libraries and archives, and it encourages greater public participation in the production of historical knowledge, supporting an open-science agenda and providing a model of digital services infrastructure.

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