NFDI4Memory will set the pace for institutional, cultural and methodological innovation in historical research, for the first time integrating research, memory and information infrastructure institutions into a common RDM infrastructure and enabling a sustainable transformation of the historically oriented humanities. With our unique expertise in digital historical source criticism and hermeneutics, we drive forward the future knowledge order for the NFDI. Our innovative, sustainable RDM methods and services will enable a broad cultural change. The consortium unites established, pioneering co-applicants and participants from across the epochal breadth of historical research with strong experience in digital methods. We have two connected aims. First, the growth of born-digital data and cutting-edge digital methods means that entirely new areas of historical research are being opened, requiring improved RDM infrastructures and services. 4Memory will advance historical research by providing RDM guidelines and digital services for a heterogenous research community still at an early stage of digital transformation. We will identify key innovations, evaluate their value to our community, foster their development, integrate them into existing structures and processes and promote their wider adoption. Our second aim is to bridge a methodological gap by bringing digital and analogue methodologies together. Digital transformation requires capacity building and cultural change, aims we pursue by enhancing digital competencies for those studying at universities, pursuing research, and working in archives, libraries and collections. 4Memory ensures the widest possible development of digital competencies and the creation of incentives and structures to make them a priority, thereby innovating historical scholarship. We will create a portfolio of key services for historical research, building a 4Memory research data infrastructure that systematically links scholarship and digital resources. Our carefully integrated internationalisation strategy will ensure global RDM perspectives are brought into the defining discussions and procedures; unite international partners in research, memory and information infrastructure institutions; and strengthen essential cooperation with transnational structures and governing bodies. We will address and provide guidance on legal and ethical issues relevant to historians, and by developing scholarship to meet the challenges and opportunities of digitalisation, we will safeguard the critical functions and social relevance of the historical method. 4Memory is the only consortium focused on historical data and methods and is well placed to reflect upon the history of knowledge structures and, therefore, to place digitalisation in a critical, long-term perspective that will serve the NFDI as a whole.
DFG Programme
NFDI technical and methodological consortia
