Current developments

Initiatives, developments and innovations

NFDI

The National Research Data Infrastructure (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur, NFDI) aims at a more co-ordinated and systematic development of research data infrastructures and data archiving procedures than before. To this end, consortia will be funded in the competitive procedure in three rounds of calls for proposals (2019, 2020, 2021), which so far have been organised primarily along the lines of alternative disciplines.

In time to come, it is expected that the work of the NFDI consortia will have a considerable impact on all disciplines, with regard to standard setting, the classification systems such as vocabularies, standard data and metadata, or in the area of data quality. In view of the heterogeneity of research approaches, methods and data in the anthropological disciplines, this poses a problem of classification and several consortium plans offer subject-specific points of contact.

The application KonsortSWD for social, educational, behavioural and economic sciences has already been approved. Among the applying institutions is Qualiservice – the Data Service Center, where possibilities for archiving and re-using ethnographic data are being developed as part of the work of the FID SKA.

The NFDI4Culture consortium was also approved. The focus here is primarily on non-textual objects with research data on tangible and intangible cultural assets. NFDI4Culture brings together specialist societies and institutions from the fields of musicology, art studies, heritage conservation, theatre dance studies and film studies.

In the current second round of calls for proposals (information on the procedure), several applications are of interest to anthropological disciplines, and the scientific societies are involved in some of them accordingly:

NFDI4Memory is aimed at all historical sciences. The FID Social and Cultural Anthropology is involved here as a participant in the area of authority data and, within the framework of the HU Berlin’s participation, in the working area of Data Culture.

Text+ focuses on language and text-based research data infrastructures, with an emphasis on philology, linguistics and edition studies, co-ordinated by the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim (this includes, for example, the Archive for Spoken German).

NFDI4Objects is an initiative with a strong focus on archaeological research and related disciplines. Social and cultural anthropological research is specifically addressed.