DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (www.dariah.eu) aims to enhance and support digitally-enabled research and teaching across the humanities and arts. DARIAH will develop, maintain and operate an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices and support researchers in using ICT-enabled methods to analyse and interpret digital resources. DARIAH is an integrating activity bringing together the state-of-the-art digital arts and humanities activities of its member countries.
DARIAH emerged as a Research Infrastructure on the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) Roadmap in 2006. This was followed by the FP7 funded preparatory phase project, ‘Preparing DARIAH’ (2008-2011). On 15 August 2014, DARIAH was established as a European legal entity, the DARIAH-ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium). The DARIAH-ERIC 15 Founding Members are Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Slovenia and Serbia. In November 2015, Poland and Portugal joined DARIAH, bringing the total to 17 Members. Although not yet a DARIAH Member, five universities from Switzerland (Basel, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich) and the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences have joined DARIAH as Cooperating Partners.
In May 2014, the Belgian Secretary of State for Science Policy signed the DARIAH-EU ‘Letter of Commitment’ and therefore secured Belgium’s position as a Founding Member of the DARIAH-EU. The Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO) was appointed as the National Representing Entity and Chris De Loof as the DARIAH-BE National Representative. Similar, Ghent University and specifically Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities was appointed as the DARIAH-BE National Coordinating Institution with Christophe Verbruggen as the DARIAH-BE National Coordinator (https://dariah.eu/about/our-partners/belgium/country-profile).
DARIAH Belgium is currently made up of 18 Partner Institutions from across the country including 11 universities: 4 Dutch-speaking universities in Flanders (Ghent, Leuven, Antwerp and Hasselt), 4 French-language universities in Louvain-La-Neuve, Liege, Mons, Namur) as well as the 3 universities in Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Université Saint-Louis Bruxelles and Université Libre de Bruxelles) and several Federal Scientific Institutions, which offer internal and external researchers access to a wealth of artistic, historic and scientific collections and related research tools (Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Royal Library of Belgium, State Archives of Belgium/ Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society, Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Science, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Royal Museums for Art and Art History, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium are DARIAH-BE Partner Institutions. We welcome participation from further Partner Institutions.