Infrastructure project
Ongoing
Data Competence Center “Humanities Education in Research, Data, and Methods” (HERMES)
Duration
2023 - 2026
Nine institutions from Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate have joined forces with the aim of establishing a joint data competence center at the interface between innovative digital methods and sustainable data curation practices. The goal is to pool the existing complementary expertise of the supporting institutions at (real and virtual) teaching, research, and networking locations and to create a framework for the broad application, innovative further development, and teaching of data science methods in the humanities and cultural sciences, as well as to contribute to the establishment of a critical data culture in the participating disciplines.
The Herder Institute participates in the Open Educational Resources (OER) and HERMES Transfer Workshop formats, thereby contributing to the creation and visibility of free teaching and learning materials, as well as to the comprehensive needs analysis regarding current and future digital skills requirements for research and GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, museums).
Significant progress has been made on the project to date.
As part of the Open Educational Resources format, networking meetings were held with the NFDI consortia 4Memory and 4Culture, DALIA, and the Quadriga data competence center, among others, to discuss key challenges such as metadata and interoperability, sustainability, and cooperation. These meetings gave rise to the OER.NET group, which continues to address these challenges across projects. Another milestone was the publication of the first preliminary version of the HERMES metadata schema for Open Educational Resources, which was made available for review in the peer group. Once finalized, it should make it possible to find resources and materials produced in HERMES together with those from various other repositories. In addition, a “How to OER” guide is currently being developed, which will accompany the metadata schema with additional information.
Within the Transfer Workshop, six workshops have been held to date with varying participants from the humanities research and GLAM sectors, as well as the associated educational institutions. In addition, an online survey is currently being conducted to supplement the results of the workshops with further data. Both the survey and the results of the workshops will be published in several papers in 2026.
