The Standardization Survival Kit (SSK)
Résumé
The H2020 project PARTHENOS (Pooling Activities Resources and Tools for Heritage E-research Networking, Optimization and Synergies) aims at strengthening the cohesion of European research in Arts and Humanities. The involved infrastructures have to address the new challenges posed by the increasing amount of digital contents and tools, and to support the emergence of a next generation of digitally aware scholars in the Arts and Humanities. Various reports and statements - like Riding the wave in 2010 - has thus acknowledged the growing importance to develop a data-centered strategy for the management of scientific data. In this context, standardization becomes a necessity for researchers in Arts and Humanities. The poster will present the work carried out for a) the Standardization Survival Kit (SSK), an overlay platform dedicated to promote a wider use of standards within Arts and Humanities; and b) a specific awareness package articulated around the “Why standards?” leaflet to make scholars understand the essential role of standardized methods and content for the reusability of research results.
The SSK is a comprehensive interface aiming at providing documentation and resources concerning standards. It covers three types of activities related to the deployment and use of standards in the Arts and Humanities scholarship:
- Documenting existing standards by providing reference materials
- Fostering the adoption of standards
- Communicating to research communities
The SSK is designed as a comprehensive interface to guide scholars through all available resources, on the basis of reference scenarios identified since the beginning of the project. The design intends to provide a single entry point for novice or advanced scholars in the domain of digital methods, so that they can have quick access to the information needed for managing digital content, or applying the appropriate method in a scholarly context. Take, for example,a scholar,with few technical skills, who wishes to work on textual resources with digital tools. The SSK will offer her/him to explore reference scenarios, enabling her/him to easily discover new materials concerning standards (e.g. TEI P5 And Its subsets), such as bibliographic references, tutorials, prototypical examples, transformation stylesheets. It will thus accompany her/him throughout her/his project, from the transcription of the primary documents to their publication online.
Theposter will also present the “Why standards”leaflet - key element of the SSK’s awareness package.The leaflet integrates a short text and a cartoon, and aims to be the point of entry to the SSK, but also to the PARTHENOS website and the helpdesk. This awareness-raising cartoon targets scholars with few technical skills: it is designed to communicate the necessity of standardization in the scientific world, in a way that will appeal to a wide audience and give a more modern and less off-putting image of standards.
