Enhanced data research infrastructures for the social sciences and humanities Researchers in all social sciences and humanities (SSH) fields require digital resources and tools that increase their efficiency and productivity. An EU initiative provided solutions to several common data concerns. Digital Economy © Thinkstock CESSDA, CLARIN, DARIAH, ESS and SHARE are five European projects in SSH aimed at the better use and development of research infrastructures at EU and international levels. Creating synergies between the projects will help solve several issues common to all of them. To address this, the EU-funded DASISH (Data service infrastructure for the social sciences and humanities) project set out to deliver solutions and methods for tackling issues such as data archiving, management, quality and enrichment in SSH research communities. Work began with a report identifying current solutions and best practices in digital infrastructure for each of the five communities. A report outlined how keystroke data can be analysed and the implications for field work. It also provided an overview of keystroke and time stamp analysis as valuable tools during all phases of surveys. As part of the field work management system, a prototype field work monitoring application for decentralised surveys was developed and made accessible via the Web. A set of guidelines for data management, data preservation and data curation were produced, as well as an overview of available models and solutions and recommendations based on these guidelines. Activities also included the establishment of a functional federated identity management service for SSH, promotion of persistent identifier services use at data centres within the five project communities, analysis and comparison of various metadata strategies for CLARIN, DARIAH and CESSDA, and identification of cross-fertilisation possibilities for joint solutions. Project partners delivered a handbook on the legal and ethical issues for SSH data in Europe. In addition, they designed three online training modules on topics relevant to the SSH communities. The modules were supplemented with five training workshops. By bringing together all five projects, DASISH enabled the interoperability and sharing of research data. This should ultimately increase the impact of SSH in Europe and beyond. Keywords Research infrastructures, social sciences and humanities, data service infrastructure, digital infrastructure
