We finally had the kick-off event of FIN-CLARIAH in the National Library of Finland on June 3 2022, big thanks to Johanna Lilja for hosting! But, what does that acronym mean in the first place? To make it simple: FIN-CLARIAH = DARIAH-FI + FIN-CLARIN. In other words, FIN-CLARIAH is a research infrastructure project funded by the Academy of Finland, and it includes two main components, DARIAH-FI and FIN-CLARIN. The former is a new infrastructure specialising in heterogenous data in humanities and social sciences, whereas the latter is an existing infrastructure for language-based research. We believe in the classical idea of “the whole being greater than the sum of its part”: by collaborating in the questions of documentation, material rights, technical access to data, and hosting tools etc., we will save a lot of time and money – and improve the conditions for top-quality research in Finland. To make this collaboration really happen, we invited all the FIN-CLARIAH people together.

The day was physically long and intellectually rewarding. First, we had a general introduction to the infrastructure from different perspectives. Then, after lunch, we had a debate in which individual researchers, memory organizations, and CSC opened their expectations towards our shared project. Finally, we had a poster session as the climax of the day. FIN-CLARIAH is organised in work packages which are responsible for the concrete deliverables such as building datasets and tools. Each work package had prepared a poster, thus, there were altogether 18 posters to be seen. There is a lot of interesting stuff coming out in the near future, you can check the posters yourself here. Absorbing that much new information demanded a lot from the FIN-CLARIAH people, but, luckily, we also had some cocktails and mocktails available for refreshment: Passion Collins, Berry Sours, and Mojitos. One goal of our kick-off event was to get to know each other, and based on my field research on that afternoon, this mission was accomplished. The next big FIN-CLARIAH meeting will be held in Jyväskylä in the fall…now that we all have already met “in the flesh”, our collaboration will surely be easier.

Risto Turunen, National Coordinator for DARIAH-FI