Date: 
31 December 2019

 

SSHOC kicked off in Utrecht in early March 2019, attracting more than 100 participants from the 47 partner organisations which represent all SSH ESFRI Landmarks and Projects (CESSDA, ESS, DARIAH, CLARIN, SHARE and E-RIHS), relevant international SSH data infrastructures, and the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER). Read about the kick-off here. Below is a comprehensive review of the main events, publications and milestones that have marked our progress to date. 

 

1. Activities
Information Gathering and Planning
  • We've created an inventory of data and metadata interoperability problems and making recommendations regarding formats and conversion services – read a summary here or download a copy of Deliverable 3.1: SSHOC Report on Data Interoperability Problems.
  • We've outlined how the project will engage with the SSHOC community to foster community engagement, develop a data-sharing culture which follows the FAIR principles, and give user communities the knowledge, skills and expertise to enable them to use and contribute to SSHOC resources – see Deliverable 6.1: SSHOC Community Engagement Strategy.
  • We've specified the SSH Open Marketplace in terms of service requirements, the data model, and system architecture and design – get an overview here or download a copy of Deliverable 7.1: System Specification - SSH Open Marketplace.
  • For the benefit of research infrastructures, the cluster projects, research librarians, and all looking to overcome the barriers to engaging with SSHOC and the wider EOSC, we've researched and documented the obstacles encountered by different user- and data-communities as they attempt to use and contribute to the evolving EOSC/SSHOC infrastructure - see the report here.

 

Data Curation
  • We've released a first version of the EMM Survey Registry, a consolidated database of quantitative surveys on ethnic and migrant minorities studies.

 

Development of Tools and Services
  • In June 2019, Slava Tykhonov from the Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS-KNAW) and Philipp Conzett (UiT/DataverseNO) were in Boston at Harvard University to present the vision for the development of the SSHOC Dataverse, an open source data repository service which is being adapted to the needs of social sciences and humanities service providers and will run directly on EOSC within 38 months. Read the article here. 
  • One of the tasks within the SSHOC project is to develop an innovative web service for the reality-based 3D annotation of heritage artefacts within the SSHOC infrastructure. Specifications for appropriate upgrades to the Aioli platform which will provide the base for this service were submitted to the European Commission during November and the report is available for view here. 

 

Launch of a Training Hub
  • Unveiled at the Open Science Fair in Porto in September, the SSHOC Training Community is a key deliverable from the SSHOC project, and contributes fundamentally to the EOSC vision of a coordinated, pan-European training infrastructure through which to build digital and Open Science skills. Read the full story here.

 

2. Main Events

In April, SSHOC was represented at EOSC-Hub week in Prague. Thereafter commenced a full programme of events, starting with an introduction to the SSH Marketplace at the Dariah Annual Event 2019 in May. This was followed by the first SSHOC workshop at LIBER’s 2019 Annual Conference in June, and a collaborative workshop with CLARIN and the Oral History & Technology taskforce in July where the topic was managing audio data.

A SSHOC masterclass entitled Using Corpora for Implementing Validation. Workflows that combine quantity and quality was held at the CLARIN Annual Conference in Leipzig in September. In October in Helsinki, SSHOC joined the ESFRI Cluster Projects, the RDA, and EOSC in a side event at RDA P14  to discuss commonalities and collaborative solutions for community research data services. SSHOC was also represented at the EOSC Symposium in Budapest in November.

SSHOC Partners - 2nd Consortium Meeting
SSHOC Partners at the 2nd SSHOC Consortium Meeting - Florence, 14-15 October 2019

3. Community Engagement

The SSHOC Website launched on 27 February and since then it has been a vibrant space, constantly on the rise in terms of readership and engagrement. Significant peaks were registered during the main events, and especially during the workshop at the LIBER conference in June and during the Open Science Fair in Porto, highlighting interest from librarians and the open science community at large. Users are well-distributed among EU Countries and also worldwide. Follower numbers on Twitter grew consistently and as of this writing are at 749. Overall we made 380.000 impressions with our Tweets and got more than 2000 retweets and in excess of  400 mentions!

 

Join the SSHOC Community

SSHOC will create the social sciences and humanities area of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) thereby facilitating access to flexible, scalable research data and related services streamlined to the precise needs of the SSH community.

  • Influence project outcomes
  • Be the first to receive news and progress reports
  • Get privileged access to resources

 

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