Task Cluster E: Collaborative Online Research Platform

Task Cluster E consists of the project part ‘PP11’, whose members are tasked with developing and implementing the Collaborative Online Research Platform ‘German in Austria’. The Collaborative Online Research Platform will be the main communication and research hub of the entire ‘German in Austria’ project. It will support not only work among and between the project’s teams, but it will also connect the project and its results to the outside world.

The project’s website serves as a starting point for getting in touch with members of the general public as well as those within the research community who are interested in the project. Initially, we will be providing relevant information about the project to different target groups. We have placed an emphasis on addressing the non-academic public and on informing them about the project and its results.

The platform will support our researchers throughout the whole research cycle, ranging from data querying and analysis to publication and sustainable preservation of research data and outcomes. The outcomes will not only include an operational collaborative online research platform for the entire project but also a comprehensive and multi-dimensional (linguistic) annotation framework, with the aim of achieving interoperability of annotation schemes, corpora, annotated data and workflows in collaborative research. This means that it will be possible to use the data being collected and analysed in the project from different viewpoints for various application purposes. The research platform will allow for the systematic collection, storage, and representation of all research data and enable the collaboration between project members.

Furthermore, our data processing practices will foster the access to research data and outcomes and facilitate the re-use of this information, also in the field of teaching. Data will be made available to the public in a number of ways including being published as linked open data. This means that all of the tools we have developed will be freely available and usable for other projects (open source) as well.
We want to create a research platform that is of interest not only to a professional audience but also to the general public. This means that the usability of the different tools is of utmost importance.

Moreover, our users – whether they are academics, students or laypersons (citizen science) – will be able to do research independently and publish their outcomes on the research platform!

As a result, we are contributing not only to collaborative research among all project members, but also to methodological innovation in the field of digital humanities!