On Thursday 17 October, an international Researchers Forum was held as part of the ATRIUM (Advancing Frontier Research in the Arts and Humanities) project. PSNC, as one of the partners included in the consortium, was the host of the first meeting of this kind, intended to exchange experiences of various researchers focused in the areas of digital humanities. The meeting was organised by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN).
ATRIUM is a project funded by the European Commission, bringing together four leading research infrastructures: DARIAH for digital arts and humanities, ARIADNE for archaeology, CLARIN for languages and OPERAS for social sciences. Following the FAIR principle, the ATRIUM project seeks to support the smooth flow of data across services, making them easier to find, accessible, interoperable and reusable. The meeting organised at the PSNC, provided an opportunity to foster wider cooperation between scientists (target group) and service providers of the designed solutions. The forum gave an occasion both to get acquainted with the GoTriple platform, which is the result of previous work by the consortium, and to get feedback on the user interface, current features and possible improvements to the platform.
The ATRIUM collaboration focuses on providing better access to state-of-the-art services for researchers in different disciplines from across countries. The project also aims to facilitate access to leading research infrastructures in the arts and humanities by improving the quality of metadata in existing catalogues and repositories. With a significant focus on the field of archaeology, ATRIUM will expand its optical character recognition (OCR), handwritten text recognition (HTR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) services.
GoTriple platform
The main focus of the meeting during the Forum was the GoTriple platform, an innovative multilingual website for researchers in the social sciences and humanities. It is a service included in the ATRIUM catalogue and provided by OPERAS Research Infrastructure. It was developed by the Italian IT company Net7 and some features were also built in collaboration with Foxcub, a French company focusing on data and artificial intelligence, partners of ATRIUM. The platform is primarily used to discover publications, projects, authors and researcher profiles in the digital humanities and is currently available in 9 languages (Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish). At the moment, the creators are working on integration with other services (including annotation tools), data visualisation and an experimental AI-based chatbot.
Usability tests conducted by the UX/UI team of PCSS
The aim of the first part of the Forum was to test the usability of the GoTriple platform by the PSNC UX/UI team. Six researchers with no previous experience of using GoTriple took part in moderated, task-based usability tests. They were divided into two subgroups, one of which performed tasks in English and the other the same tasks in Polish. As they tested the available capabilities offered by GoTriple, they described their actions and any difficulties encountered. The English-speaking group’s test sessions were broadcast live to the conference room, where they could be observed by other Forum participants. The UX/UI team explored the intuitiveness of the interface and the quality of the results provided by the platform. After the testing phase, both groups took part in a moderated discussion led by OPERAS about their testing experience, their first impressions of the platform and suggestions for improvements.
The second part of the Forum was an expert panel, during which another six scientists with experience in similar platforms or experience with GoTriple were invited. In the focus group, participants shared their insights and suggestions on three pre-selected current features of the platform. The experts discussed possible directions for GoTriple, again based on the three pre-selected themes.
― We still need to analyse all of the data and summarise the results, but we could immediately see how insightful and useful the forum was based on the real needs and experiences of researchers. It also reinforced the importance of the multilingual aspect of GoTriple and gave us valuable information on how to shape the next steps in the development of the platform. In conclusion, the ATRIUM Researcher Forum was very useful and I believe that other ATRIUM services could benefit from this type of event, underlined Carol Delmazo, OPERAS representative at the Forum and leader of the work package “Fostering Cross-Disciplinary Research through Training and Open Science”.
― The First Researcher Forum was an exciting experience for the ATRIUM team and IBL PAN, as the organisers. We look forward to sharing the event’s results with the wider community and are preparing to organise another ATRIUM event format: the Mutual Learning Exercise, which will take place in the first half of 2025, said Tomasz Umerle, IBL PAN leader in ATRIUM.
Work on further stages of the project on the PSNC side is being continued by the Digital Libraries Department.
