Meeting Scholars Where They Are: The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) and a Social Humanities Infrastructure

Abstract

The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) is the central organizing force for several virtual research environments (VREs). ARC is the hub for these period-specific nodes, which offer digital project peer review, aggregation and search technologies, and forms of community engagement. The mission of both ARC and the nodes is to construct and support a “social system” for the humanities in which the digital and the traditional can come together to develop a working social humanities infrastructure. This article discusses how the ARC infrastructure evolved from the framework of scholarly engagement developed by NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) and explains how the consortium assists the scholarly community: through digital project peer review, aggregation and search, and outreach services.