Dallas, Costis (2013) Scholarly Activity, Information Requirements and Research Infrastructures

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Costis Dallas (2013) Scholarly activity, information requirements and researchinfrastructures: European initiatives and intellectual foundations

Outline

European digital infrastructures for the humanities

Presenting method and results of a recent study

Questioning some widely accepted truisms:

Should infrastructures mainly serve digital humanists?

provide those services researchers ask for? offer access chiefly to primary data?

mainly support information seeking?

implement the humanities research worlflow?

be like integrated Virtual Research Environments? Theorizing and modeling scholarly activity

Conceptual dependencies and open issues


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Digital infrastructure initiatives

and user research


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European humanities digitalresearch infrastructures projects

Digital Research Infrastructure for the Artsand Humanities

European Holocaust Research Infrastructure

Advanced Research Infrastructure for

Archaeological Datasets Networking inEurope

Europeana Cloud / Europeana Research

Also

Network for Digital Methods in the Arts andHumanities

Collaborative European Digital ArchiveInfrastructure

..and HERA, Project BAMBOO, DASISH,HERA, CenterNet, arts-humanities.net


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DARIAH-EU

Mission: to enhance and support digitally-enabled researchacross the humanities and arts

DARIAH aims to develop and maintain an infrastructure insupport of ICT-based research practices

DARIAH is working with communities of practice to: Explore and apply ICT-based methods and tools to enable new

research questions to be asked and old questions to be posed innew ways

Improve research opportunities and outcomes through linkingdistributed digital source materials of many kinds

Exchange knowledge, expertise, methodologies and practicesacross domains and disciplines

Legal form: Established as an European Research InfrastructureConsortium (ERIC)

Follow-up from Preparing DARIAH(2008-2011) project


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Studying scholarly practice and needsin EU infrastructures projects

Semi-structured interviews in the Preparing DARIAHproject(DCU, Greece)

Mixed methods research in EHRI, based on concurrent: Researcher questionnaire survey (N: 277; DCU, Greece) 15 semi-structured interviews with researchers (DCU, Greece) 20 semi-structured interviews with archivists (KCL, UK; NIOD,

Netherlands)

Further research

ARIADNE and eCloud starting now (February March 2013)

DARIAH-EU planned research on Understanding scholarly

practice (2013-2015) Methods ontology work in collaboration with NeDiMAH

(initiated January 2013)


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Information seeking, behaviour anduse research on scholarly practice

Stone (1982) Humanities scholars: information needs and uses

Tibbo (1991) Information systems and services for the humanities

Beeman (1994) Stalking the art historian

Dalton & Charnigo (2004) Historians and their information sources

Duff et al. (2004) Historians use of archival sources Toms & OBrien (2008) Understanding the ICT needs of the e-

humanist

Palmer & Craigin (2008) Scholarship and disciplinary practices

and many more: Jones (1989), Sievert & Sievert (1989), Gould(1998), Chu (1999), Yakel (2005), Case (2002/2006)


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Studying humanists in the digitalinfrastructures specification context

Different questions to those in informationbehaviour research

Instrumental rationale: to develop bettersystem requirements for infrastructures

Addressing affordances that may not yetexist


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Approach and objectives

Specification of digital infrastructurse for the arts andhumanities needs to address the historical practices,needs and perceptions of scholars

Seeking to understand information requirements ofscholarly research, as well as differences between

disciplines, research fields and methodologies Evidence-based substantiation of infrastructure

requirements and specificationsHow scholars interact with the whole spectrum of information

and conceptual entities, digital as well as non-digital

Developing a conceptual framework for the identificationof pertinent categories and properties representingscholarly research


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EHRI

How do Holocaust researchers familiar withdigital technology account for theirinformation needs, practices and

technology use?


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EHRI survey

Population

Online digital technology usersinvolved in Holocaust-relatedresearch, regardless of professionalstatus and affiliation

Most appropriate target group for

use of planned EHRI services Sampling

Purposive sampling approach

Recruitement of respondentsthrough publicity to:

Holocaust-related online

forums and informationservices

EHRI network of partners

Data constitution

Online questionnaire, using theSurveymonkey service

277 total valid responses (less insome questions)

Mixed methods methodological

framework Questionnaire survey running in

parallel to semi-structuredinterviews, analyzed by means ofqualitative content analysis andconceptual modeling

Questionnaire formulationinformed by preliminary interviewresults

Survey results further interpretedthrough semi-structured interviews


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Scope of survey

Demographics of research actors Country of residence

Status (researcher, student,amateur..)

Discipline or field of research

Experience in archival research

Use of different kinds of resources Unpublished resources

Published sources

Reported importance of specificresearch activities Information seeking

Entry points to information

Foreign language use Storing and organising

Studying and annotating

Collaborating

Procedures: beliefs and attitudes On collaboration and sharing

On resource trustworthiness

Place Place of work

Hardware devices used

Digital tools and services Software tools used

Online services used

Motives Reasons for using digital

technology for research


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Who are the Holocaust

researchers?

NB: Purposive sample represents

connected researchers


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Most respondents live in Europe;

US residents the 2nd largest group.

Most respondents live inEurope, while one out ofseven (14%) lives in theUnited States. The largestgroups are residents of

Germany (20%) and Holland(15%). Next are residents ofIsrael and the UK (6%),Hungary (4%), Greece,France, Belgium andRomania (3%).

EHRI researchers questionnaire survey. C. Dallas, A. Benardou & P. Constantopoulos,

Digital Curation Unit-IMIS, Athena Research Centre, Greece (2011-12).


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More than are professional researchers; students and

amateurs follow suit.

Researchers are the largestgroup: 28% working inuniversities, 13% outsideacademia and 13% arefreelance. 20% are PhD or

postgraduate students.Smaller groups includeamateur researchers (7%)and museum professionals(5%).




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2/3 are historians followed by Hebrew/Jewish studies,

cultural studies, literature & political science.

Of 292 respondents, 187identified history as one oftheir research fields, 45 saidHebrew/Jewish studies, 37cultural studies, 28 languagesand literature, 21 political

science and 18 internationalrelations. Museum studies,sociology, visual studies andarchival science followed suit.

Holocaust-related culturalrepresentation, memory andtrauma research may explainnon-obvious frequency ofcultural and museum studies.




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Most respondents report being experienced in archival

research.

Of 190 respondents to thisquestion, 90 identifythemselves as experts inconducting archivalresearch, 85 as of

intermediate expertise andonly 15 as novices.




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Use of resources


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Textual resources still predominate;audio and video have gone digital.

The large majority of respondentsreport using textual resources inorder of frequency, correspondence,official and legal documents - andphotographs, compared to much

smaller numbers for audiovisualmedia. Textual sources are notablymore often accessed in analog form;conversely, video and soundrecordings are more often accessed indigital form.




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Books still most commonly used;

print still more common than digital access.

Books are the most commonkind of published sources usedby respondents, closelyfollowed by journals,conference proceedings and,

not far behind, self-publishedand grey literature. Print is stillmore common than digitalaccess, especially for books.




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Digital access for journals predictably more common foracademic faculty and students.


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Research activities


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Most important research

activities for respondents

Multilingual primary resource use tops the list.Activities related to seeking unpublished sources, as well

as in filing and organizing both unpublished and published

materials are also often listed as very important:

Footnote hunting, query searching, query refinement

and consulting finding aids to find primary sources

Storing digital copies, collecting references, andstoring printed copies of both unpublished and

published materials

Activities related to study and annotation follow suit in

being often considered very important:

Highlighting relevant text passages, storing notes

with them, looking for interesting passages andwriting margin notes

Asking for comments on initial research ideas follows as

the most important collaboration activity


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Named entities and dates the most important

aspects of subject used to find unpublished sources.

In seeking primary sourcesby subject, the mostcommon entry pointsconsidered as veryimportant by respondents

were, in order of frequency,person names, dates, placesand names of specificevents; classifications ofevents, of people and ofplaces, and other topics,were less frequentlymentioned as veryimportant.



f i i h i h h i


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Name of issuing authority or author the most important

document property used to find sources.

In seeking primary sourcesby document property, themost common entry pointsconsidered as veryimportant by respondents

were, in order of frequency,name of author or issuingauthority, collection name,resource genre and format.Document properties wereless frequently reported asvery important than aspectsof resource subject such asnamed entities and dates.




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Attitudes

R h f h l i i i b


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Research of other people is an important interest; about

would share resources and publish jointly

About two thirds would liketo find out about otherscurrent research work.

Almost as many:

Would share interesting

resources and inform-ation on their own work

Would like to publishtogether with others

Fewer regard copyright or

privacy as major obstacles.



S id i t bli ti t t th d


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Some consider print publications more trustworthy, and

physical archive resources more so than digital.

A sizeable minority considerprinted papers and booksmore trustworthy thanonline publications, andresources in a physical

archives more trustworthythan those in a digitalarchive.




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Place of work

M d t k t h th i lib hi


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More respondents work at home than in a library, an archive o

in a shared or private office.

The majority of respondentswork regularly at home.

Many work in a library, and aslightly lower number in anarchive.

Fewer still work in a personalor shared office.



F ti l th i PC h d


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Four times as many people use their own PC vs. a shared

one; a sizeable minority uses digital tables or mobiles.

Most respondents use theirown computer for researchpurposes.

A much smaller, but stillsizeable proportion, use a

digital tablet, or ashared/work computer.

These results, suggestingmobility and independence,fit well with the information

that respondents work moreoften at home, and alsofrequently at other placessuch as a library or archive.


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Use of digital tools and services

Excel is the Swiss army knife for research data;


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Excel is the Swiss army knife for research data;

a small minority use user-configured Access DBs.

The most common softwareapplications used are wordprocessors and spreadsheets.A bibliographic referencemanagement software, as

well as various databaseapplications follow suit. Onlya few use institutional orthematic researchrepositories.



Google dominates online services use; filesharing and social


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Google dominates online services use; filesharing and social

network services are also used by some.

Google+ - probably meant asGoogle in general tops thelist of online services used,followed by GoogleDocuments and Translate.

Decreasing numbersmention that they useDropbox, various socialnetworks such as Facebook,academia.edu and LinkedIn,and Twitter.

Zotero and Refworks arealso used, albeit by a smallminority.




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Motives for ICT use

Majority uses computers for diverse research uses


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Majority uses computers for diverse research uses,

including annotation & research data management.

The majority of respondentsuse computers for mostaspects of the researchlifecycle: word processing,searching catalogues and

finding digital resources,communicating withcolleagues, searching digital

journals, keeping notes,organizing research data,preparing presentations,

and storing relevantpublications locally.




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Theorizing scholarly practice


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J. Unsworths scholarly primitives

On humanities research process modeling: a core list ofprimitives Discovering Annotating

Comparing Referring Sampling Illustrating Representing

Providing for information access, manipulation and displayenvironments with appropriate affordances and user interfaces

Facilitating digital scholarship through new kinds ofrepresentation and analysis of arts and humanities information


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Modeling scholarly practice

A formal model, intended to captureknowledge about scholarly informationpractices

A specialisation of CIDOC ConceptualReference Model

Inspired by activity theory


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Scholarly Research Activity Model


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Cultural-historical activity theory

Activity: purposeful interaction of a subject with theworld

Directed toward an object, a physical or conceptual entityembodying the fulfilment of some objective or motive,intended to meet a specific needofthe subject

Activity systems are composed as a hierarchy ofactivities,constituted by conscious actions, which in turn areconstituted by sub-conscious operations

Subjects can be individuals, but also communities ofpractice, sharing needs and motives.

Activities take place by means oftool mediation, whichinclude both physical and cognitive mediationalartefacts


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The compositional structure ofactivity


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A simple(r) activity theory model

i i i f


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Descriptive vs. normative aspects ofscholarly activity


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Scholarly information activity

as digital curation at the source


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Questions

What is the scope of information objects curated inthe scholarly research process?

What is the relation between data and scholarly objects?

What is the structure of scholarly research activity,

and what does it entail? How do workflows look like, and how fixed are they?

How serialised, and how granular, are scholarly primitives?

What is the relationship between information seeking

and curation, as part of scholarly activity? When is curation enacted in the scholarly activity lifecycle,

and by whom?

C f i bj


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Co-reference, merging objectidentity

Quite frequently a scholar might find a fragment of asculpture or vase in one museum that joins to a similarpiece in another museum. Dyfri Williams has done justthat with an Archaic Greek vase fragment, in the Ure

Museum [], that joins a dinos (bowl) attributed tothe painter, Sophilos, which is housed in the BritishMuseum []. So access to the fragment on the Ure DBgives visitors only a glimpse of the whole, and to seethe more significant parts of the vase, one has to haveaccess to the corresponding piece in the BritishMuseum (Fuchs, Isaksen & Smith, 2005)


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Object collocation, attribution

[] The same Archaic fragment is also partof several distributed assemblages ofobjects. For example, someone interested

in the works of Sophilos would wish toconsult all of the 91 works attributed to orsigned by that artist [...] These are

fortunately brought together, albeit inlimited form, on the Beazley Archive.(Fuchs, Isaksen & Smith, 2005)


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Costis Dallas (2013) Scholarly activity, information requirements and research

infrastructures: European initiatives and intellectual foundations

Versioning, curating

Okay, you get someone annotating or correcting orsending information. You can get it as a list ofemails, and then you have to work with that, andthen you need the management tool for that. Youneed to know, okay, this one must be sent to thisadvisor ... This one is something that I can ignore.This one needs another consultation with thisexpert. This one I want to take into account andchangethe authorised description. So this kind of

administrative tool does not exist, we [haventfound] yet a good tool for that anywhere. (Speck &Links 2013: archivist interview)


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Searching, organising

I want to be able to search through all notecards Ihave ever made ever in my life, not just those for acertain text I've read since that would limit my quotesto that text. I want every quote I've ever jotted downthat contains the word "umbrage" to appear if I searchfor that term. [] I want to then have a space where Ican take the results of multiple such searches: Victorian

Honor

Umbrage

and order the notecards or quotes in a way I want.(anon. 2010, chroniclecareers.com forum)

T l ti t ti


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Term selection, construction,definition

As far as possible I use established terms asclearly as I can. I would rather try to describewhat Im looking at and see how it sits withinthe framework of discussion in the literature. I

think if you have to call a new term you couldhave to be really sure what you are doing. []Where one does have to create a new term itneeds to be glossed with the kind of definition

that you hope will then get into the secondaryliterature in its own right (UK archaeologist,quoted in Benardou et al. 2010)


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Scholarly primitives as research activity-centred relations

R l ti hi b t ti iti d


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Relationship between activities andinformation objects


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Interplay between facts and theories

[i]t is conceivable that, through the use of links, website visitors may be able to see how the archaeologistmoves back and forth [] between images, artifacts,documents, and theories, to arrive at aninterpretation about the site. They may be able to

better understand which of the archaeologist'squestions were NOT answered what "testimplications" were NOT met. Suppose visitors could"see", with image maps, say, the artifacts as they layin the ground and experience links between those

artifacts and the ethnographic examples thatsuggested certain kinds of artifact patterning to thearchaeologist? (Landow 1992)


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infrastructures: European initiatives and intellectual foundations56

From objects to theories

categorical knowledge,

domain knowledge,

theories, classifications,

ontologies

things in the

world

identifications,

descriptions, facts


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Epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina 1999)

Particular configurations of Working practices Institutional arrangements

Roles and hierarchies

Technologies

They differ amongst different communitiesof epistemic practice

E.g., between high-energy physicists andmolecular biologists

Not only diffferent disciplines!


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Tool mediation

Archaeologists need to be more aware not only of howwe span the multiple gaps, the multiple fields, betweenthe material world and text, plans, maps, illustrations andso on, but also of how these processes are caught up indiverse networks linking fields which encompasseverything from funding bodies, sociopolitical alliances,

media and materialities [] to, for example, even themodes of engagement and articulation practised by anartillery officer in the British military during theNapoleonic wars. We need [] to situate this process inrelation to these larger networks []. Things (our tapes,trowels, theodolites, media, etc.), too, have a stake in our

nonlinear and interconnected paths of knowledgeproduction []. They too must be included. This scheme ofmultiple fields is a means of maintaining something of thecomplexity of archaeological practice in our modes ofdocumentation and language. (Witmore 2004)


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Tool mediation: a broader account

A continuum of epistemic objects, mediated by Thick descriptions, materiality-informed inscriptions

Importance of secondary archive

Complex subject access Overlapping and inconsistent terminologies

Different languages, disciplinary traditions

Persistence of value of old knowledge

Static or slow-changing information resources, e.g.corpora

Legacy research always important


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Object-centered research mediation

Epistemic cultures in object-centred disciplines Information-intensive, object-centred

E.g., molecular biology, archaeology, art history

Typically idiographic rather than nomothetic

Densely connected, deeply nested, topologicallycomplex objects

Inconsistency of facts, intransitivity in reasoning

Practice informed by thingy mediating tools Quasi-objects, boundary objects, mutable mobiles

Material tools, interactive kinds

People in situated action

H h l i l it


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How an archaeological siteremembers its facts


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The world of activity

Activity model

Epistemic agency

Epistemic process

Epistemic object

A second-level articulation between anontology, an epistemology and a

methodology


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Scholarly activity meta-domains

Scholarlyactivity

Epistemicagency

Epistemicobjects

Epistemicprocess

Epistemology


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Questions and issues


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Infrastructure requirements

Individual disciplines (will) have their own mechanisms,repositories, tools and other resources

In this light, where are particular needs for cross-disciplineresources, services, tools, infrastructures?

Which of the following is a) desirable, b) feasible? Do nothing is should be an issue for each discipline to solve Focus just on cross-discipline information dissemination, so that

people can know and adopt tools and services used succesfully inneighbouring disciplines

Identify those collections/resources/datasets used across specificdisciplines, and provide cross-discipline access

Federate and provide collective access to all discipline-basedinformation sources (collection-level, people, methods etc.)

Federate and provide full access to individual resources across thehumanities

Requirements information access and


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Requirements information access anddiscovery

Do we need information services on Research problems, programmes, long-term initiatives?

Topics, research areas, concepts, theories as entry points?

People, i.e., scholars, researchers? E.g., a registry or communityof practice where humanists can find out what others are working

on; who works on a particular area, etc? Collections of research sources, existing databases, repositories,

archive? E.g., a collection level registry? Should it include justdigital or all collections?

Research methods, procedures, best practices? E.g., an systematic

index of methods related to disciplines and research problems?Also with particular projects / people / collections involved?

Tools and services? Listing what tools are available, and for whichpurpose?


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Requirements curation

Primary cultural object repositories, corpora, databases etc.exist in different countries, disciplines, research areas, andrightly so, ensuring reliability and authenticity

Given the nature of humanities information objects, and therise of online research, how do we keep up to date

information on corrections, annotations, links as knowledge onthese objects evolves?

Given that scholarly research is evidenced in publication -increasingly digital, especially for journals- is it useful toconnect these to resources, and how?

How do we imagine online scholarly communication? Apartfrom digital publication, is interaction in blogs, forums etc.important? Should it become part of the information record ofresearch? How should it be preserved and supported?


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Requirements - sociotechnical

Should infrastructure projects (such as DARIAH) focusmostly on developing their own systems, or not?

Which of the following are a) desirable, b) feasible? Develop prescriptive mechanisms for particular areas of scholarly

information, e.g. for scholarly resource metadata and work

towards enforcement across Europe Develop tools; a workbench; a virtual research environment Develop / evangelise standards, guidelines etc. to mine connect,

integrate existing resources, tools etc. Develop canonical meta-collections, filters, recommenders Energise particular business models, trial initiatives etc. in the area

of scholarly communication, publication, open access, academicadvancement etc.

Advocate adoption of digital humanities, provide information,learning materials etc.


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Six truisms on the specification of

humanities digital infrastructures


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Truism #1: Digital infrastructures shouldserve digital humanists


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Truism #2: Digital infrastructures should bebased on digital services humanists ask for


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Truism #3: Digital infrastructures shouldprovide access to primary research data


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Truism #4: Digital infrastructures shouldfocus on serving information seeking needs


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Truism #6: digital infrastructures shouldprovide an integrated virtual research

environment for humanists


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Thank you!

For more info:http://www.dariah.eu

http://[email protected]

Dallas, Costis (2013) Scholarly Activity, Information Requirements and Research Infrastructures

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