What humanists want: how scholars use source materials

Despite the growing prominence of digital libraries as tools to support humanities scholars, little is known about the work practices and needs of these scholars as they pertain to working with source documents. In this paper we present our findings from a formative user study consisting of semi-structured interviews with eight scholars. We find that the use of source materials (by which we mean the original physical documents or digital facsimiles with minimal editorial intervention) in scholarship is not a simple, straight-forward examination of a document in isolation. Instead, scholars study source materials as an integral part of a complex ecosystem of inquiry that seeks to understand both the text being studied and the context in which that text was created, transmitted and used. Drawing examples from our interviews, we address critical questions of why scholars use source documents and what information they hope to gain by studying them. We also briefly summarize key note-taking practices as a means for assessing the potential to design user interfaces that support scholarly work-practices.