I am today at the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin Ireland. The DHO provides research and teaching standardization, consultation, outreach, training, and services to digital humanists in Ireland.
The Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) is an all-island digital humanities collaboratory working with Humanities Serving Irish Society (HSIS), national, European, and international partners to further e-scholarship. The DHO is a knowledge resource providing outreach and education on a broad range of digital humanities topics. It provides data management, curation, and discovery services supporting the long-term access to, and greater exploitation of, digital resources in the creation of new models, methodologies and paradigms for 21st century scholarship.
In these cases it is always interesting to see what the media make of this project – see €28 m observatory to digitize history.
I’m not sure where the term “observatory” comes from, but it is cropping up as a new term for centers. Actually, it suggests the opposite of a centralizing centre; an observatory looks out and presumably supports rather than centralizes.