Digital Research Infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Canada
By: Alyssa Arbuckle, Strategic Research and Partnerships Advisor
https://doi.org/10.82389/1ave-en35
How does humanities and social sciences data move through the research ecosystem? Publication, licensing, standards, preservation … who is responsible for what? How does this system work? And what is digital research infrastructure anyways?
Those are just some of the questions that the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Canada: An Updated Landscape Analysis (2025) seeks to answer.
A collaborative project of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and Érudit, I undertook the initial draft of this landscape analysis from April to July 2024, revised, and released it as a pre-publication community draft for discussion in April 2025. The initial methodology included a scoping review of comparable reports and analyses from different international jurisdictions; research into humanities and social sciences (HSS) digital research infrastructure (DRI); and a set of conversations with 22 key stakeholders in the Canadian HSS DRI landscape. Following community consultation via conference presentations, anonymous peer review, an open survey, and various discussions, I revised the current, updated version of this landscape analysis from August to October 2025 and published it in November 2025. This landscape analysis surveys 13 key DRI organizations connected to the humanities and social sciences (including CRKN, Érudit, and others who have come together in an HSS DRI group), as well as an additional 33 related initiatives.
First things first: what is digital research infrastructure?
Digital research infrastructure can be considered as the tools, technologies, hardware, software, and (importantly) people who facilitate digital research.
To answer the first question of this post, DRI is how HSS data moves. Think of the standard first step of humanities methodology: the research scan. A humanities scholar or student accesses their library’s online catalogue to gather all the published research articles on a specific topic. Already, there are multiple components of digital research infrastructure at work: at the article level, that piece probably has a digital object identifier and a licence; it is stored somewhere (e.g. repository, publishers’ website); its metadata is catalogued in the retrieval platform; it might draw from data stored in a large data repository. Even by seeking just one article, a researcher has already touched multiple DRI components: persistent identifiers, licenses, preservation practices, repositories, metadata standards, etc. Of course, the scholar has probably not thought through these interlocking systems, and who coordinates them; they are simply looking for an article – one of dozens or hundreds that could make it into their research scan, before they even start writing up and then publishing their own findings. This frictionless state is one of the reasons people consider DRI to be invisible but critical. DRI is quietly present throughout the whole research lifecycle: from the conception of an idea to its eventual publication and preservation as a research output.
What were the findings?
The landscape analysis finds that there is substantial coverage of the HSS DRI landscape, with clusters of organizations and activity around specific areas (e.g. open access, libraries, publishing, repositories, research data management, and preservation).
Figure 1: Research, library, and scholarly communication keywords related to HSS DRI organizations.
The key HSS DRI organizations are also responsible for or have played a role in several of the HSS DRI initiatives surveyed.
Figure 2: Key DRI organizations (on the y-axis) and their related initiatives (on the x-axis). Red dot = initiatives organizations currently lead; orange dot = initiatives organizations engage with (do not lead); yellow dot = initiatives organizations previously led, now led by a different organization; green dot = initiatives organizations previously led, still participate in substantially.
Challenges were flagged, too: many cite ongoing sustainability as a central challenge, with a focus on funding competitions, resource allocation, training, highly qualified personnel, and researcher engagement.
Concluding thoughts
Canadian HSS DRI enables critical research across the country and ensures that such research and its published output will be findable and accessible for generations of knowledge creation and creators to come. HSS research in Canada will falter without the standardization and support of DRI; in an overwhelmingly digital knowledge environment, research and data that are not discoverable (or optimized for machine learning) are not read, never mind reused.
Strong HSS DRI does not solely benefit the humanities and social sciences research community, however. Ensuring that this type of work is broadly accessible, in an ongoing way, guarantees that all of those who are interested in, work with, and benefit from humanities and social sciences data and publications can engage with and rely on this shared knowledge trust—whether they are academic researchers or not.
Citation
Arbuckle, Alyssa. 2025. Digital Research Infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Canada: An Updated Landscape Analysis (2025). https://doi.org/10.82389/vcmd-va82.
Alyssa Arbuckle https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7286-3054
Alyssa holds an interdisciplinary PhD from the University of Victoria, which focuses on open social scholarship and its implementation. She has worked in the open digital scholarship space since 2013.