Organisation

In early 2018 the IT departments of the three institutes of the HuC were merged into one group, the Digital Infrastructure (DI) department of the KNAW Humanities Cluster. This has created a unique department in the field of infrastructure for the humanities, one of the largest in Europe.

DI focuses on supporting the researchers of the Humanities Cluster. Through mostly externally funded projects (mainly by NWO, but also increasingly by European funds) we build generic infrastructure and specific research software. These projects have led to close partnerships with heritage institutions such as the National Library of the Netherlands, the National Archives, most Dutch universities, other scientific organisations such as DANS and research institutes in Europe.

We make the infrastructure created in these projects available to all humanities researchers. This is done not only by sharing code, data and collections (open source and according to FAIR principles), but also by making infrastructure itself available. The DI department therefore manages a multitude of websites, tools and digital collections.

DI employs almost 30 people. Besides a director and a small staff for planning, consultancy and communication, most of the colleagues work in six areas of expertise: Infrastructure Services, Structured Data, Text Analysis, Computer vision, Spatial Computing and Interface Design. One team focuses on managing the infrastructure, software and data. The other teams build software and therefore consist entirely of software engineers. Each engineer has a unique specialisation in addition to extensive experience of working in humanities research.

See also : Working with DI and our Intranet (login required)