SSHOC

SSHOC stands for Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud and is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program (H2020-INFRAEOSC-04-2018, grant agreement #823782). It started on the 1st of January 2019 and runs until 30th of April 2022. The main coordinator is CESSDA ERIC (Consortium of European Social Sciences Data Archives) and the overall budget is more than 14 Million Euro (see CORDIS for further information).

The Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ACDH-CH) is one of more than 40 partners engaged in the project. Among them prominently are all five ERICs (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) of the SSH cluster, including the two humanities ERICs DARIAH-EU (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure). Bringing together actors from the Social Sciences as well as the Humanities SSHOC aims to establish an European wide digital infrastructure for researchers as part of the broader EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) initiative. One key element for SSHOC is the development of an Open Marketplace, where the ACDH-CH is substantially involved and is responsible for the task of implementing the Marketplace solution/platform.

The Open Marketplace will help researchers in finding tools, documentation, training material and resources that can be helpful for their digital work. It builds up on similar previous initiatives like TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Researchers), DARIAH’s TERESAH (Tools E-Registry for E-Social science, Arts and Humanities) and PARTHENOS’ SSK (Standardization Survival Kit). A main challenge is to offer in an understandable and usable manner the richness of very diverse information covering the whole spectrum of research activities across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Therefore a user-centric approach is being pursued both during the development as well as an integral aspect of the platform to build. Numerous features should support a lively community as a precondition for a sustainable service, which many researchers can benefit from.

ACDH-CH is furthermore involved in Work Package 3: “Lifting Technologies and Services into the SSH Cloud” and Work Package 6: “Fostering Communities, Empowering Users & Building Expertise” (leading Task 6.3: “Empowering Users: Training Materials and Online Learning Paths”). Output from there will be also integrated into the SSHOC Open Marketplace.

SSHOC is a great opportunity for experts from a broad range of disciplines to work together on fostering the use of digital methods and tools. This is at the core of the mission of ACDH-CH since the funding of the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities in 2015.