RESILIENCE Joins SSHOC Partner Consortium
RESILIENCE has joined the Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) partner consortium. SSHOC is a H2020 funded project developing the social sciences and humanities area of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). RESILIENCE is building a high-performance platform, supplying evolving tools and big data to scholars in the field of Religious Studies and is interested to learn from SSHOC and to establish constructive and productive relationships with its partners, bringing in its own specificities.
RESILIENCE’s mission is to enable and speed up digital and physical access to material related to religion. Taking on the work done by the starting community, ReIReS, RESILIENCE further developed and improved the concept of the research infrastructure and finalized the design for a sustainable research infrastructure for all Religious Studies. This design has now proven to be mature and was successfully evaluated by the ESFRI forum, allowing RESILIENCE to take its place in the strategic Research Infrastructures for the European Research Area.
Synergies
The new partnership is expected to create synergies for both sides: RESILIENCE will bring in its specificities regarding serving scholars working on Religious Studies, as well as its unique focus on both physical and digital aspects of Religious Studies including its attempt to build bridges in between them. By its focus on Religious Studies, RESILIENCE is complementary to the work of SSHOC and forms the thematic community of “(Digital) Religious Studies”, being able to address the specific aspirations of other stakeholders not directly being addressed by SSHOC. More collaboration possibilities are foreseen in the future, for example around the formation of thematic communities related to Religious Studies concerning data management, and the training program.
RESILIENCE, having started later than SSHOC and being executed by a smaller consortium will benefit from SSHOC’s experiences in building a diverse and sustainable research infrastructure. Moreover, entering the SHHOC network will allow RESILIENCE to establish constructive and productive relationships with its partners, which it considers as highly valuable in light of the long-term duration of its RI.
Furthermore, there is a mutual benefit due to activities on material science. While SSHOC adds information on material science to the data description, RESILIENCE comes with a sophisticated pan-European Book Heritage Lab that makes invasive and non-invasive analysis of physical heritage possible and digitally transforms material not only by its content, but also of its carrier to enable new research insights.
Partnership
As RESILIENCE is not yet a legal entity, the partnership has been established via the RESILIENCE consortium partners FSCIRE (coordinator, Italy) and InfAI (Germany). FSCIRE and InfAI, are consortium partners of RESILIENCE, which fills the gap in the ERA and SSHOC on Religious Studies.
FSCIRE and SSHOC already met during the webinar EOSC in practice in November, 2020, where Prof. Dr. Alberto Melloni (Director of FSCIRE) presented the necessity and challenges of a research infrastructure on Religious Studies.
Prof. Dr. Alberto Melloni: “FSCIRE brings into SSHOC the challenges coming from the field of Religious Studies: we don’t aim simply at digitising and reducing the time of research, but to push the change from digital to AI tools while using data and sources coming from our domain, with their linguistic, material, cultural, historical complexities and dynamics.”
