Understanding the Information Requirements of Arts and Humanities Scholarship

This paper reports on research of scholarly research practices and requirements conducted in the context of the Preparing DARIAH European e-Infrastructures project, with a view to ensuring current and future fitness for purpose of the planned digital infrastructure, services and tools. It summarises the findings of earlier research, primarily from the field of human information behaviour as applied in scholarly work, it presents a conceptual perspective informed by cultural-historical activity theory, it introduces briefly a formal conceptual model for scholarly research activity compliant with CIDOC CRM, it describes the plan of work and methodology of an empirical research project based on open-questionnaire interviews with arts and humanities researchers, and presents illustrative examples of segmentation, tagging and initial conceptual analysis of the empirical evidence. Finally, it presents plans for future work, consisting, firstly, of a comprehensive re-analysis of interview segments within the framework of the scholarly research activity model, and, secondly, of the integration of this analysis with the extended digital curation process model we presented in earlier work.

[1]  B. Latour,et al.  Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts , 1979 .

[2]  Sue Stone,et al.  Humanities scholars: Information Needs and Uses , 1982, J. Documentation.

[3]  Liam J. Bannon,et al.  Beyond the Interface: Encountering Artifacts in Use , 1989 .

[4]  Marcia J. Bates,et al.  The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface , 1989 .

[5]  Carol Collier Kuhlthau,et al.  Inside the search process: Information seeking from the user's perspective , 1991, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[6]  D. Ellis.  Modeling the Information-Seeking Patterns of Academic Researchers: A Grounded Theory Approach , 1993, The Library Quarterly.

[7]  Deborah N. Wilde,et al.  Research practices of humanities scholars in an online environment: The Getty online searching project report no. 3 , 1995 .

[8]  Mark A. Shields.  Work and technology in higher education : the social construction of academic computing , 1996 .

[9]  Susan E. Searing.  Meeting the Information Needs of Interdisciplinary Scholars: Issues for Administrators of Large University Libraries , 1996, Libr. Trends.

[10]  Clay Spinuzzi,et al.  Context and consciousness: Activity theory and human-computer interaction , 1997 .

[11]  Lisa Covi,et al.  Material Mastery: Situating Digital Library Use in University Research Practices , 1999, Inf. Process. Manag..

[12]  Edgar A. Whitley,et al.  The Construction of Social Reality , 1999 .

[13]  Roberto C. Delgadillo,et al.  FUTURE HISTORIANS : THEIR QUEST FOR INFORMATION , 1999 .

[14]  K. Knorr-Cetina,et al.  Epistemic cultures : how the sciences make knowledge , 1999 .

[15]  Κωνσταντίνος Δάλλας.  Humanistic research, information resources and electronic communication , 1999 .

[16]  Tonyia J. Tidline,et al.  Scholarly work in the humanities and the evolving information environment , 2001 .

[17]  Catherine A. Johnson,et al.  Accidentally Found on Purpose: Information-Seeking Behavior of Historians in Archives , 2002, The Library Quarterly.

[18]  Laura J. Neumann,et al.  The Information Work of Interdisciplinary Humanities Scholars: Exploration and Translation , 2002, The Library Quarterly.

[19]  E. Rogers,et al.  Diffusion of innovations , 1964, Encyclopedia of Sport Management.

[20]  Lokman I. Meho,et al.  Modeling the information-seeking behavior of social scientists: Ellis's study revisited , 2003, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[21]  Nigel Ford,et al.  Serendipity and information seeking: an empirical study , 2003, J. Documentation.

[22]  M. Dalton,et al.  Historians and Their Information Sources , 2004 .

[23]  Allen Foster,et al.  A nonlinear model of information-seeking behavior , 2004, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[24]  J. Cherry,et al.  Historians’ Use of Archival Sources: Promises and Pitfalls of the Digital Age , 2004 .

[25]  Rjoè,et al.  Activity theory as a framework for analyzing and redesigning work , 2005 .

[26]  J. Unsworth.  Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences , 2006 .

[27]  Tobias Blanke,et al.  The Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative in the UK , 2006, 2006 Second IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science'06).

[28]  Jan L. G. Dietz,et al.  Enterprise ontology - theory and methodology , 2006 .

[29]  John Bradley,et al.  Supporting Annotation as a Scholarly Tool - Experiences From the Online Chopin Variorum Edition , 2006, Lit. Linguistic Comput..

[30]  Victor Kaptelinin,et al.  Acting with technology: Activity theory and interaction design , 2006, First Monday.

[31]  David Bamman,et al.  eScience and the humanities , 2007, International Journal on Digital Libraries.

[32]  C. Rusbridge,et al.  The International Journal of Digital Curation , 2008 .

[33]  P. Constantopoulos,et al.  Aspects of a digital curation agenda for cultural heritage , 2007 .

[34]  H. Tibbo.  Primarily History in America: How U.S. Historians Search for Primary Materials at the Dawn of the Digital Age , 2007 .

[35]  William Hemmig.  The information-seeking behavior of visual artists: a literature review , 2008, J. Documentation.

[36]  David. Green,et al.  Things to Do while Waiting for the Future to Happen: Building Cyberinfrastructure for the Liberal Arts , 2008 .

[37]  Panos Constantopoulos,et al.  DCC&U: An Extended Digital Curation Lifecycle Model , 2009, Int. J. Digit. Curation.

[38]  Jenny Fry,et al.  Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet , 2010, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[39]  Costis J. Dallas,et al.  An agency-oriented approach to digital curation theory and practice , 2011 .

[40]  Mark Hedges,et al.  Preparing DARIAH , 2011, 2011 IEEE Seventh International Conference on eScience.