Spheres of Alfalab, Virtual Research Environments between research questions and infrastructure

Abstract

'Alfalab is a collaborative framework project of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Its partners are: Data Archiving and Networked Services, The Fryske Akademy, The Huygens Instituut, The Meertens Instituut, the International Institute of Social History, the Virtual Knowledge Studio and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The total budget is 1.4 Million Euros. Alfalab started in March 2009 and is still ongoing. It applies and promotes the use of digital tools and methods in humanities research, and fosters cooperation at national and international levels. Collaboration is implemented on all possible levels with and between researchers and with networks such as CLARIN-NL and DARIAH. Alfalab supports cooperation by delivering Virtual Research Environments (VREs). Currently Alfalab is developing three VREs: TextLab, GISLab and LifeLab. These VREs will interconnect through shared open annotations