Live from Würzburg: Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Black Dariah

In the first session (birds singing and sun shining outside), Armin Volkmann and Christof Schöch presented DARIAH and some of its subprojects. The beauty of European projects is in general the complexity of the structure they develop in order to involve the different partners – and the acronyms they use. DARIAH does makes not exception – the bubbles and arrows showing the whole structure are colorful and complex – an administrative wonder if there ever was one.

One first big project they mentioned is the one working on standardizing metadata. In the course of the discussion, it turned out to be still pretty virtual, but it really is the kind of things that one can only hope will not remain virtual.

Quoting from Martin Müller’s letter, they presented several DARIAH projects working on developing TEI-aware tools. Christof mentioned to me later interesting projects like MONK and TXM textométrie that work in that sense.

On the question of community building (one of the aims of DARIAH), they suggested creating a Wikipedia portal. Although I am not sure which kind of crowd you can actually gather this way, it will surely reach a wider range of people.

Discussion also revolved around the question of the format of membership to the TEI-consortium. Although Martin Müller is not here, obviously his letter and the issues it raises are quite present.