Cyprus, which applied on March 19, 2014 and was accepted recently, joins Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Serbia and Slovenia as Founding Members.

France will be the host country of the DARIAH-ERIC. Until the European Commission freezes the documents in the next few weeks, additional countries can still join as Founding Members.

Cyprus’ participation in DARIAH has been initiated by Dr. Marinos Ioannides, Chair of the Digital Heritage Research Lab at the Cyprus University of Technology.

The National Representing Entity is the Digital Champion of Cyprus, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Energy, Commerce, Industry and Tourism, Stelios Himonas.

The grand vision for DARIAH is to facilitate long-term access to, and use of, all European Arts and Humanities (A+H) digital research data.

The DARIAH infrastructure will be a connected network of people, information, tools, and methodologies for investigating, exploring and supporting work across the broad spectrum of the digital humanities.

Researchers will use DARIAH to find and use a wide range of research data from across Europe; exchange knowledge, expertise, methodologies, and practices across domains and disciplines; ensure that they work to accepted standards and follow best practice; and experiment and innovate in collaboration with other scholars

The core strategy of DARIAH is to bring together national, regional, and local endeavours to form a cooperative infrastructure where complementarities and new challenges are clearly identified and acted upon.

DARIAH submitted an application to the European Commission to establish a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC). This legal framework will facilitate the long-term sustainability of DARIAH.

Source: Famagusta Gazette