The Mainz Center for Digitality in the Humanities and Cultural Studies (mainzed) has published its recommendations on the handling of digital data in research, teaching, and knowledge transfer. As a result, six academic institutions in Mainz have agreed that all research projects conducted through mainzed will, as a matter of principle, make their scientific data openly and permanently available. A distinctive feature of Mainz is that the recommendations also include data generated for teaching and for the transfer of scientific research findings to business and society.
Today, large digital datasets are being generated across all disciplines in the sciences. This also applies to the digital humanities. Digital data from the humanities should be preserved just as comprehensively and made available to future generations as the card catalogs and notebooks of previous generations. Only in this way can the results of today’s research be verified later and used to investigate new questions. Furthermore, society should have access to the data so that current research can be incorporated into today’s important knowledge sources—such as Wikipedia—and also be utilized for economic purposes.
Properly managing data from their research currently poses major challenges for many researchers. In most academic disciplines, procedures, common conventions, and institutions dedicated to managing data are only just beginning to emerge. mainzed has now developed recommendations that provide guidance to all researchers conducting joint projects under the center’s umbrella.
The recommendations were signed by all six research institutions affiliated with mainzed. For the director of the Leibniz Institute for European History, Professor Dr. Johannes Paulmann, the recommendations are exemplary. He notes: “As an institute conducting historical research, we can derive internal guidelines directly from them.” From the perspective of the providers of technical infrastructure, this is where the value of the mainzed recommendations lies. “Recommendations for action that are developed collaboratively through research are an important building block for us in ensuring the long-term preservation of research data,” emphasizes Professor Dr. André Brinkmann, director of the Center for Data Processing at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
The Mainz Center for Digitality in the Humanities and Cultural Studies was founded in 2015 to pool expertise in the field of digital humanities at the Mainz research hub. Partners in mainzed include the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz, Mainz University of Applied Sciences, the Institute for Historical Regional Studies at the University of Mainz e. V., Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the Leibniz Institute for European History, and the Roman-Germanic Central Museum | Leibniz Research Institute for Archaeology.
Contact:
Dr. Anne Klammt
Executive Director
mainzed - Mainz Center for Digitality in the Humanities and Cultural Studies
c/o Mainz University of Applied Sciences
Lucy-Hillebrand-Str. 2 | D0.02
55128 Mainz
Tel: +49 6131 628 - 1495
Email: klammt@mainzed.org
Web: mainzed.org
