PHD SCHOOL IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND ECONOMICS

Thesis title: Research Infrastructures in Social Sciences and Humanities. A new quali-quantitative approach for the evaluation of impacts.

Research Infrastructures (RIs) represent the backbone of science as we perform it today. Evaluation, as a process of better understanding both the strong and weak points of such projects, was often performed on the RIs in the STEM reality, allowing in the last decade the birth of a florid landscape of researches and approaches. Despite that, the infrastructures in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) did not receive the same kind of attention, leaving a blank space in the literature. The issue related to these infrastructures are linked with the nature of this research field itself, for the nature of social science as capable of impact beyond the borders of science and scientific productions. Moreover, SSH are difficult to analyze under the lens of classical evaluation standard, due to the unicity of their products and processes. Starting from these premises, this work push for the experimentation of a new tool, a quali-quantitative method of analysis that try to capture the essence and the difficulties of the SSH and apply a useful and explicative evaluation of research infrastructures now operative in Europe. Using as case study two projects of the ESFRI framework, OPERAS and DARIAH, this work build a solid literature review on the evaluation mechanisms and processes focused on RIs and make clear the scientific gap it tries to overcome. In the second and third chapter, the tool is experimented on the two infrastructures, via the instruments of the semi-structured interviews and the survey analysis. In the last chapter and conclusion, the work draws some elements from this experimentation, with all its limits and difficulties, arose in the three years of projects. The tool used is far from being able to perfectly perform an evaluation. Yet, it allows to approach the SSH RIs better observing their characteristics and peculiarities, building a solid ground for future approaches using both this experimental method and other, more classical, evaluation techniques.