# Introducing Transformations: A DARIAH Journal

Toma Tasovac

► To cite this version:

Toma Tasovac. Introducing Transformations: A DARIAH Journal. Transformations: A DARIAH Journal, 2025, Workflows, 10.46298/transformations.15787. hal-05092331v2

HAL Id: hal-05092331

https://hal.science/hal-05092331v2

Submitted on 10 Jun 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

# Introducing Transformations:
A DARIAH Journal

Toma Tasovac ID

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities / Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities

Humanists are no strangers to transformations: we study how ideas, beliefs and convictions evolve over time; how social and cultural practices shift; and how artistic forms adapt under historical pressures. We trace how languages emerge, grow, flourish and, sometimes, die. We examine how texts, images and cultural artefacts are conceived, structured and then given new meanings in various historical periods and across different media. We explore the interplay of tradition and innovation, continuity and rupture, memory and creativity. Because, like Heraclitus, we know that the only true constant is change.

But what's in a name? When we chose to call our new publication *Transformations: A DARIAH Journal*, we were, generally speaking, evoking these deep, timeless currents of humanistic thought, while, at the same time, and in a very specific sense, referring to the ways in which the more recent embrace of digital methods has reshaped our disciplines. The shift from analogue to digital, from paper to screens, and from close to distant reading techniques has once again brought into focus for us the important role that technology plays in the production of knowledge.

These days, in particular, with artificial intelligence looming everywhere we turn, we are caught—in yet another variation on the theme of relentless change—between the promises of spectacular scientific discoveries and the threat of human obsolescence. In such a precarious landscape, we cannot afford to treat our own methodological, conceptual and aesthetic transformations as mere rhetorical flourishes in some grand narrative of technological progress. Instead, we should be mindful of them and embrace them as the necessary precondition for maintaining the relevance of humanistic inquiry.
Choice of name aside, why would a research infrastructure like DARIAH decide to start a scholarly journal in the first place? We have argued elsewhere that research infrastructures can only thrive in the long term if the researchers who contribute to their development and growth receive academic credit for the kind of work they do in and around these facilities (Tasovac et al. 2023). The mission of *Transformations*, which we launched as DARIAH celebrated its 10-year anniversary as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), is, therefore, unabashedly programmatic. We seek to foster open science in the arts and humanities, enable fairer research assessment practices and support the recognition of a broader range of research outputs—beyond articles and monographs—that have long remained undervalued by conventional academic metrics. We do this because we are a founding member of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), and because we recognise that traditional research outputs often conceal the infrastructural labour that underpins them. *Transformations* will strive to highlight these overlooked contributions and give them the credit they deserve.

We are committed to publishing scholarly accounts of various “ephemeral” activities—detailed descriptions of datasets and workflows, annotation practices, software tools and training materials, to name just a few—alongside the more traditional narrative papers. Because we know that knowledge production is a multi-step process, and that excellence is not only found in polished monographs or dense journal articles at the end of a research journey. It is also to be sought in the careful design of textual corpora, the meticulous crafting of code, the complex modelling of 3D digital twins, and the iterative interplay of annotation and analysis, all of which deserve to be recognised and shared.

The medium of our journal itself aligns with its message. *Transformations* is hosted on Episciences, a diamond open-access overlay journal platform provided by our partner, the Centre for Direct Scientific Communication. Episciences allows us to set up a transparent publishing system on top of a community-governed, public infrastructure. Unlike traditional paywalled journals, which are tied to commercial publishers and driven by exorbitant profit margins, an overlay journal such as *Transformations* does not hide content behind proprietary systems. Instead, it operates by peer reviewing work that has been deposited in trusted open repositories such as HAL or arXiv, where it can be freely accessed, indexed and preserved—at no additional cost to the author or the reader. This commitment to public infrastructures is part of the DARIAH ethos. By embracing the overlay journal model, we show how research infrastructures can help move away from commercial gatekeepers and towards more equitable research ecosystems.

It is also somehow fitting that our first thematic issue should be dedicated to the topic of workflows. Workflows are the connective tissue of scholarship—the
series of steps and decisions that guide us from collecting primary sources
to shaping hermeneutic perspectives about them. Too often, these steps are
glossed over in scholarly publications. By foregrounding workflows, we want
to stress that *how* we do research in the digital age is just as important as *what*
we discover. Documenting and sharing workflows makes digitally enabled
research more reproducible and transparent, allowing others to reuse, learn
from and build upon these processes. A researcher may rely on a specific
database, software library or digital model: by drawing attention to them,
we implicitly recognise those who maintain datasets, build tools and design
platforms as first-class contributors to knowledge creation.

All of these commitments—to open science, fairer assessment practices, public
infrastructures and reproducible workflows—should help us respond to the
challenges and opportunities of conducting research in the age of artificial
intelligence. AI tools are already assisting arts and humanities scholars in
numerous tasks, from transcribing archival texts to analysing cultural datasets
at scale. But they also prompt urgent questions about the nature of authorship,
credibility and ethics. When algorithms can generate entirely plausible texts or
identify patterns faster than any human, the humanistic approach to research
that *Transformations* stands for—with its emphasis on context, critical interpre-
tation and ethical self-reflection—remains more important than ever. Without
transparent tooling and a shared consensus on the systemic importance of
public infrastructures, we would find it increasingly difficult to distinguish
rigorous scholarship from automatically generated, hallucinogenic noise.

What remains in the end, I hope, will be what was always already there in the
beginning: an enduring impulse to seek, to question, to wonder, and to try to
understand what it means to be human.

References

Tasovac, Toma, Laurent Romary, Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, et al. 2023. “The Role of Research Infrastructures in the Research Assessment Reform: A DARIAH Position Paper.” HAL. Version 1, 21 June. https://hal.science/hal-04136772v1.