This project contributes to the community pillar of the NFCS NetworkPlus project. The project seeks to gather validated requirements for federation, targeting the Arts and Humanities (A&H) domain based on existing approaches, needs and communities interested in their implementation through a national federated compute service. It builds on existing insights and efforts from the A&H research communities, evidencing the workflows and practices as well as needs for computing and data services specific to A&H research (Sufi et al. 2023; De Roure et al. 2022; Meroño-Peñuela et al. 2025).
Within this context, a range of initiatives are currently exploring Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) requirements for the A&H community. These efforts highlight the importance of providing accessible computing resources to support researchers working with complex, often multimodal datasets. Challenges in this domain refer to fragmented and non-standardised data production, limited data publication and reuse, and barriers to access computational resources due to gaps in digital literacy.
Several initiatives have been launched to address such challenges by:
- improving digital skills and literacy among A&H researchers;
- enabling access to computing resources for A&H researchers;
- providing opportunities to Research Technical Professionals (RTPs) to familiarise with digital methods in the A&H research;
- support networking and community building for A&H researchers using digital methods and RTPs;
- investigating tools, codes, and workflows used by the community to support planning for DRI investment and planning.
Within these efforts, the idea of federation is a long-term goal for a successful ecosystem of research in this area. Yet, the requirements, practices and paths for federation remain largely unexplored. Building on the previous efforts, this project aims to engage with communities to collectively elicit requirements around federation within the current DRI A&H landscape to contribute to the NFCS roadmap development
References:
- Sufi, S., et al. (2023). Report on the AHRC Digital/ Software Requirements Survey 2021: Where is
Investment Needed? (1.0). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7686348 - De Roure, et al. (2022). DigiSpec: Scoping Future Born-Digital Data Services for the Arts and
Humanities: Case Reports. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4716148 - Meroño-Peñuela, A. et al. (2025). How an AI-ready National Data Library would help UK science.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14672231