More and more universities in the world are betting on innovation, even those in the Humanities, which normally remain outside the umbrella of the concept of “innovation”. There are many examples of Digital Humanities Centers in the world .
These centers channel interdisciplinary research into technological knowledge applied to the humanities and carry out large-scale digitization projects, the Ukraine Mobile Number List development of dictionaries or the creation of standards, which are essential so that everyone can find the information they are looking for on the Internet. They are already widespread in countries such as Canada, the United States, Germany and Great Britain, and the vast majority are included in the centerNet platform .
At the National University of Distance Education (UNED) we recently inaugurated the Digital Innovation in Humanities Laboratory, which was conceived as a Center for Digital Humanities and as a coordinating entity for a project on linked data, called UNEDATA . The union of both projects makes the Laboratory an original initiative that will allow the University to integrate into international networks while improving the cohesion of its internal network.
In this article I would like to summarize some reasons why we decided to take this step. Integrate the University into an international trend that continues to gain strength In the last decade, the Humanities have undergone a great transformation thanks to technology and international networks have been created that connect Universities, associations and communities of researchers interested in the Digital Humanities. In Spain, the Association of Hispanic Humanities was established in 2012 to delve deeper into this field.
Similarly, in 2014 the Association of Digital Humanities was created in Argentina and in 2011 in Mexico the Digital Humanities Network , which is increasingly gaining strength as a means of dissemination and electronic communication. This network of associations has been present for a longer time in other countries such as Italy , Germany and at a European and international level . Facilitate researchers' access to specialized technological tools One of the key activities of these centers consists of the digital edition of texts in their different types (criticism, genetics, informative, etc.) but the existing tools are complex and are not available in Spanish. In general, knowledge of international standards such as those proposed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is quite scarce, which since 1994 has promoted a standard for labeling texts in XML applied to specific texts in the field of the humanities.
Take advantage of technology to facilitate academic exchange and give visibility to the Humanities One of the great current challenges for Universities has to do with the integration of internal information systems with those of other universities. In Europe there are projects such as LinkedUp or Linked Universities that aim to integrate open data from all Universities so that they can be explored and analyzed.
In order to integrate UNED in this area, we decided to use open source software developed by Cornell University and that has already been used in other American universities such as Duke, Brown or Colorado and in Europe by some Dutch universities. This software, called VIVO , allows you to unite and display data from the University and connect it with that of other Universities in the world that have their data open and published in standards based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) . As a result, a first version of this project is now available on the UNEDATA website .
Open the data to the entire academic community and the general public Improving the interconnection between databases and data is a key step to improve the visibility of the University's academic and research offering. With this we hope to create a “Research Map” that allows us at a glance to navigate through all the researchers and related resources, and make known the added value of the University. The opening of data in the university environment is also an upward trend, and in Spain there is increasing interest in this area, as seen in the recent creation of the Open University Project community , which depends on the Open Knowledge group in Spain , or the open data portals of the Pompeu Fabra University , the University of Deusto , the Pablo de Olavide University or the University of León .