DARIAH integrates digital arts and humanities research and activities from across Europe, enabling transnational and transdisciplinary approaches. In particular, it provides value to its members and stakeholders through the validation and sharing of data, services and tools; by providing training and education opportunities; by enabling ‘bottom-up’ organisation around emerging research needs; and through the exercise of foresight and policy engagement. Through these activities, DARIAH promotes the further development of research methods in the arts and humanities, documenting the state-of-the-art, supporting the preservation and curation of research data with a focus on particular challenges including diversity, provenance, multimedia collections and granularity, and acting as a coordinator and integrator for a diverse community of practice.

Structurally, DARIAH operates through the Europe-wide networks of the Virtual Competency Centres (VCCs) and their constituent working groups. Each of the four VCCs is cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional, international and centred on a specific area of expertise. VCC1, the e-Infrastructure, is responsible for DARIAH’s technological foundations. It maintains a digital environment that allows community-developed data and tools to be shared and ensures the quality, permanence and growth of technical services for the arts and humanities. VCC2 is the Research and Education Liaison and acts as the primary interface with the research and teaching communities. VCC3 deals with Scholarly Content Management in the various stages from creation, curation, and dissemination, through to the pooling of scholarly digital resources and results for reuse. VCC4 focusses on Advocacy, Impact and Outreach, interfacing with key influencers in and for the arts and humanities. Within this structure, DARIAH has over 20 dynamic working groups to integrate national services under specific operational categories.

To best tackle the broad, interdisciplinary questions that arise when studying digital technology, ODH works closely with the scholarly community and other funding agencies in the United States and abroad, to encourage collaboration across national and disciplinary boundaries.
Funded digital projects contribute to humanities scholarship that serve carefully-identified audiences, address issues of accessibility and usability, and are designed to be open, replicable, and sustainable. All projects funded in this division analyze their workflows and publish their results in white papers that are shared widely. This body of work contributes to the bibliography of digital humanities.
ODH staff members participate in conferences and workshops with the scholarly community to help foster understanding of issues in the digital humanities and to ensure we are meeting the needs of the field.