Challenges in Enabling Mixed Media Scholarly Research with Multi-media Data in a Sustainable Infrastructure

Big-scale infrastructure projects in the humanities and social sciences such as the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) (Edmond et al., 2017), or the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) (Hinrichs and Krauwer, 2014) aim to provide solutions for both preservation and access to collections and data necessary for scholarly research (Zundert, 2012). Some infrastructure projects build decentralized “atomic” software services, e.g., as in the LLS infrastructure project (Buchler et al., 2016), while others prefer to build more centralized virtual research environments, as in the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) (Lauer, 2014). Also, even within a single infrastructure project, these two models can coexist. This is the case of the CLARIAH infrastructure, where different approaches have been taken to date for serving different user groups, i.e., several specialized tools for linguists (Odijk, Broeder & Barbiers, 2015), or a research environment (the Media Suite) that serves the scholarly needs for working with audiovisual data collections and related mixed-media contextual sources that are maintained at cultural heritage and knowledge institutions. This paper discusses the rationale and challenges behind the development of the Media Suite.