The Collaborative European Digital Archival Research Infrastructure (CENDARI) is a European project of 14 research institutions, aiming at the development of a research infrastructure that facilitates access to sources and research on transnational historical questions.
The Birmingham team leads two work packages within the project: the dissemination of knowledge on CENDARI and interdisciplinary training within the scientific community and developing the methodological groundwork of the infrastructure. Moreover, it contributes expertise on World War I, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, which forms one of the two test cases of the project (the other being Medieval Culture). The team's contribution to CENDARI includes research on historians' work practices and how this knowledge can be used to inform a large-scale digital-humanities project.
Much of CENDARI’s work will be invisible to scholars: in the networking of archives and supporting of standards for the description of research objects. But the culmination of the project will be an ‘enquiry environment,’ a research infrastructure for scholars that combines wide visibility across the collections of physically dispersed archives of Europe with cutting edge tools for the interrogation of that data, such as multilingual searches, custom visualisations, shared research and collaboration spaces and personalised virtual environments.
For more information see: www.cendari.eu