One of the primary goals of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) research infrastructure initiative is to provide integrated access for research data, tools, and services across all scientific domains in Europe. Although EOSC currently houses millions of research outputs, the issue of workflows – step-by-step instructions of how a research process is conducted, enabling reproducibility of research – is considerably more complex and represents only a fraction of this content. This challenge becomes even more pronounced in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) due to its diverse and heterogeneous nature across various disciplines.
The SSH Open Marketplace, developed during the Horizon 2020 Project SSHOC, acts as a thematic entry door into the EOSC and is maintained by DARIAH, CLARIN, and CESSDA. The development work behind the SSH Open Marketplace was inspired by previous ventures such as the DiRT directory (Dombrowski 2014), TAPoR, and Standardization Survival Kit (Riondet & Romary, 2018), and indeed the initial data aggregation came in part from these sources (Gray et al., 2021). Aside from this initial data aggregation, the SSH Open Marketplace also developed a sustainability plan and governance scheme that integrated the lessons learned from these previous experiences in order to integrate community feedback and provide solid infrastructure and human resource support from the ERICs in the interest of maintaining platform viability (Dombrowski, 2021; Petitfils et al., 2021).
A cornerstone feature of the SSH Open Marketplace is its Workflows, which leverage the platform's inherent contextualisation to provide a systematic, step-by-step representation of a research scenario. Workflows offer an ideal means of sharing one's research resources and maximising the potential of the SSH Open Marketplace. By integrating tools and services with publications, datasets, and training materials, workflows offer a comprehensive view of a research endeavour, making it both reproducible and user-friendly.
However, workflows are inherently reliant on users, both for their creation, and those that will implement them to reproduce research methods. Consequently, within the Bibliographical Data Working Group of DARIAH, members organised a booksprint in October 2023 with the dual purpose of generating new workflows (Lindemann & Klaes, 2023; Moretti & Heibi, 2023; Péter, 2023; Umerle & Malínek, 2023; Tomczyńska & Korytkowski, 2023; Tolonen et al., 2023) and addressing fundamental questions surrounding them (Malínek et al., 2024). This included inquiries into the essence of constructing a SSH workflow, the potential criteria for their development, the expectations of the DH community regarding SSH workflows, and an evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses.
Panel Structure:
The aim of the proposed panel, moderated by Mikko Tolonen, is to analyze and discuss possibilities of use, maintenance and further development of SSH Open Marketplace as a key vehicle for collecting and presenting the SSH workflows. Our panellists will further develop and build upon results achieved within Bibliographical Data Working Group´s Open Bibliodata Workflows project as well as introduce their own experiences of SSH Open Marketplace editors and representatives.
The panel will be centred around three main parts (each approx. 20-25 minutes) and a final general discussion. In the first part, two bibliodata related workflows will be introduced as model case studies: “LODification of bibliographical data: Zotero to Wikibase migration with ZotWb” (Lindemann & Klaes, 2023) and “Multilingual analysis and visualization of bibliographic metadata and texts with AVOBMAT” (Péter, 2023). These workflows were selected with regard to their interdisciplinarity and can serve as practical model demonstrations of SSH workflows. First one showcases how to convert bibliographical data into a wikidata structure with the use of open software solutions. The second case study presents the workflow of the AVOBMAT multilingual research tool (Péter et al., 2020, 2022), which enables researchers to critically analyse, enrich bibliographic data and texts at scale with the help of NLP methods. The implemented analytical and visualisation tools provide close and distant reading of texts and bibliographic data with time-based components.
Following these case studies, the rest of the panel will be arranged in an interactive way in the form of a round table where these and other practical experiences with SSH Open Marketplace (e.g. Candela et al., 2023 & Chambers et al., 2023) as an environment for creation and storing of such workflows will be discussed and evaluated from the perspective of SSH Open Marketplace editors and curators (S. Chambers, E. Gray) as well as from the position of the external users. Subsequently, the panel will discuss the future development plans of the SSH Open Marketplace platform and its strategic goals. Each part will be followed by discussion with the audience and a general discussion as the last part of the panel.
