| Status: in progress | First online: 22-04-2021 | Updated: 05-12-2021 |
title: NDHL's UCloud Demo of Pan-Nordic Colleboration during the Covid-19 Pandemic
partners: Kristoffer L. Nielbo, Eetu Mäkelä, Lars G. B. Johnsen
organizations: Aarhus University, Helsinki University
data providers: National Library of Sweden, National Library of Norway
hpc center: DeiC Facility for Interactive HPC
Introduction
Contemporary digital and online media (e.g., microblogging, social networking and news sites) have provided valuable data resources for studying humans’ sociocultural and psychological responses to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. While the potential value of such data for studying coping responses is not new, the global urgency of COVID-19 has made it easier for researchers to gain access to said data. In general, media data are either person-sensitive (e.g., tweets, FB posts) or proprietary (e.g., news articles), which impose restrictions on how researchers can store, share, and process them. The NeIC-funded Nordic Digital Humanities Laboratory (NDHL) was created in order to facilitate and standardize access to cultural heritage data across the Nordics – digital and online media among these. NDHL used the COVID-19 pandemic to negotiate access to COVID-19 newspapers and social media in order to train models for detection of crisis-induced uncertainty and pandemic coping responses and provide derived pandemic media data for the research community at large.
In this EOSC demonstrator, NDHL partners from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden show how they share proprietary news data and collaborate on a common codebase for media monitoring in UCloud. UCloud is an interactive digital research environment built to support the needs of researchers for both computing and data management, throughout all the data life cycle. It is designed to be user-friendly with an intuitive graphical user interface, flexible and extensible to account for the multi-scale and multi-disciplinary research challenges, and the high data intensity and heterogeneity. The focus of UCloud is to make complex digital technology accessible to all users.
The demonstrator specifically shows how the Danish host can manage the NDHL project in UCloud (add users, allocate resources to sub-projects, apply for additional resources), how the shared file system functions for sharing access to proprietary data (persmission depending on nationality, onboarding procedure, git integration), and, finally, how partners from three different nationalities can live share development of a media monitoring tool. The demonstrator concludes that UCloud 1) enables international collaboration and 2) removes overhead on setting up and maintaining local servers, and 3) has the potantial for revolutionizing both access to compute and data resources for SSH researchers.