Across the Social Sciences and Humanities, many of the most pressing research data challenges are best addressed through collaboration - in the space between infrastructures, research practices, and support communities. The Thematic Digital Competence Centre for the Social Sciences & Humanities (TDCC SSH) was created to surface shared challenges and support collaborative solutions.
Since 2023, the programme has facilitated access to NWO funding, enabling a growing portfolio of projects addressing topics such as synthetic data, audiovisual workflows, sensitive data reuse, multimodal research data, and the responsible use of online public material. What these projects share is not only their technical ambition, but their collaborative nature: they bring together researchers, data professionals, infrastructures, and other research-performing organisations to address issues that no single actor can solve alone.
This session will highlight a selection of projects from the TDCC SSH portfolio, focusing on lessons learned from developing and implementing cross-institutional solutions. Speakers will reflect on how community needs can be translated into practical tools, workflows, and guidance, and how collaboration across institutions and domains can accelerate progress in FAIR data and software practices.
The session will also look ahead. Drawing on experiences from the project portfolio, we will invite the audience to reflect on how these lessons might shape future directions for collaborative initiatives in the SSH domain.
By connecting experiences across projects and institutions, the session aims to spark discussion, inspire new collaborations, and highlight how collective efforts can strengthen the future of SSH research.