D2.1 Landscaping and building communities

The Humanities and Heritage Italian Open Science Cloud (H2IOSC) project involves four Italian nodes of research infrastructures (RIs) - CLARIN, DARIAH, E-RIHS, and OPERAS. Within this project, the second work package focuses on establishing, mapping, and monitoring strategies for assessing the national and international operation contexts for the four RIs, the characteristics of their user communities, and the specific data resources, services, and tools that are most needed, used and newly created. The main objective of this work package is to conduct a comprehensive survey of the landscape of language technologies, humanities, and heritage science in Italy. This survey takes into account existing projects, resources, tools, communities, best practices, and standards that need to be integrated into the national Marketplace as well as the repositories of the four RIs. Collaboration within the work package was directed at structuring shared procedures for developing, managing, and adapting the survey's main objectives. Priority was on identifying and engaging key stakeholders within various communities. The surveying activity was organized around a set of shared activities, in parallel with others conducted by each infrastructure. The initial coordination activity focused on defining dimensions and criteria to guide the survey. It resulted in the creation of a structured questionnaire, which was designed to gather information about user needs, engage with stakeholders, identify communities of reference, evaluate relevant projects, and assess the FAIRness of data. The questionnaire was employed to gather insights on a wide range of topics, including data resources, software, tools, projects, training needs, prior knowledge of RIs, publications, and feedback. Such a questionnaire has been distributed among the relevant disciplinary communities and sub-communities of the four RIs. Respondents included students, researchers, professors, and subject matter experts in social science, digital humanities, and cultural heritage research fields. Preliminary results from the control group gave insights into the challenges and opportunities of the survey. Respondents have shared valuable information about data resources, technologies, software, and their training needs. The results highlight the need for clearer communication, dissemination activities, and better engagement strategies to encourage participation from the wider community. Addressing the lack of...