The CLARIAH Media Suite is an application for doing research with data collections . It is meant to be used exclusively by scholars and students at universities and higher education (e.g., film, television, and other media scholars, oral historians, and political historians). They can log into the Media Suite using their university credentials . Others may also find the Media Suite useful however, such as employees of institutes that provide data collections. They receive access rights for their own collections. Or citizen scientists that may be interested in the open access collections that are available.

The CLARIAH Media Suite is one of the applications of the Dutch infrastructure for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences developed in the CLARIAH project. It facilitates access to key Dutch media collections with advanced multimedia search and analysis tools.

The Media Suite is an innovative digital research environment, an experimental environment (LAB) , in which we are experimenting with new ways of working with multimedia data collections. It furthermore aims to cater to various levels of expertise and research interests: from providing access to many audiovisual collections for exploratory research to close reading; and from more complex modes of data analysis to distant reading strategies. The transparent search and analysis tools that the Media Suite offers, combined with its APIs that can be used with Jupyter notebooks, allow for many new possibilities for research and represents the middle ground between full algorithmic literacy and being a data novice. The Media Suite is in a constant process of co-development with its users and, in that sense, it is not a “finished” environment. We regularly publish about this process and other aspects of the CLARIAH infrastructure and its Media Suite.