Heike Neuroth

Heike Neuroth holds a Ph.D. in Geology and has been working at the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) in Germany since 1997, where she heads the Research and Development Department (RDD). She has been involved in building virtual research environments since the start of the project TextGrid in 2005. TextGrid has been the first of Germany’s Grid projects catering for the specific requirements of researchers in the humanities. In particular, it aims at building a virtual research environment for the collaborative analysing, annotating, editing and publication of specialist text resources. Since the second phase of TextGrid (2009), these activities have broadened, aiming to include other scientific communities like musicology and history of art.

Other parts of her work include combining scientific community grids in the WissGrid (Grid for Science) project, where she acts as the spokesperson for the steering group.

Additionally, she has been working as an e-Humanities consultant at the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) since February 2008.

A Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities (e-Science methods in Arts and Humanities): abstract

The TextGrid research group, a consortium of 10 research institutions in Germany, is developing a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for researchers in the arts and humanities that provides services and tools for the analysis of text data and supports the curation of research data by means of grid technology. Libraries and data centres as well as universities and research institutions are collaborating in a community-driven process that is funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). Initially consisting of two academic communities in 2006, textual philology and linguistics, the TextGrid project was joined by art history, classical philology, and musicology in 2009 and is part of the German grid initiative D-Grid. The TextGrid VRE consists of two main components: the TextGrid Lab(oratory), which serves as the entry point to the virtual research environment, and the TextGrid Rep(ository), which is a long-term humanities data archive ensuring sustainability, interoperability and long-term access to research data. To support all stages of the research lifecycle, preserve and maintain research data and ensure its long-term usefulness, existing research practices must be supported.

Therefore the TextGridLab provides common functionalities in a sustainable environment to intensify re-use of data, tools and services and the TextGridRep enables researchers to publish and share their data in a way that supports long-term availability and reusability.

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