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The Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archival Research Infrastructure (CENDARI) project has developed a new virtual environment for humanities research, reimagining the analogue landscape of research sources for medieval and modern history and humanities research infrastructure models for the digital age. To achieve this, the project has needed to be sensitive to the ways in which historical research practices in the 21st Century are distinct from those of earlier eras, harnessing the affordances of technology to reveal connections and support or refute hypotheses, enabling transnational approaches, and federating sources beyond the well-known and across the largely national organization paradigms that dominate within traditional knowledge infrastructures (libraries, archives and museums). This paper describes both the usercentered development methodology deployed by the project and the resulting technical architecture adopted to meet these challenging requirements. The resulting system is a robust ‘enquiry environment’ able to integrate a variety of data types and standards with bespoke tools for the curation, annotation, communication and validation of historical insight. Introduction Unlike in the natural, biological, and many physical sciences, the historian’s object of study is never directly accessible. What she has instead are her sources, those physical remnants of the past which provide better or worse evidence of the events that occurred, and sometimes of the causes of those events. The primacy of the source, and in particular the primary source, as the bedrock of the historical research method creates a certain continuity over the centuries, but this is not to say that historical research paradigms are static. Modern research infrastructures must therefore be sensitive to the ways in which historical research practices in the twenty-first century are distinct from those of earlier eras. In particular, new environments for research must take into account the affordances of technology to reveal connections and support or refute hypotheses, as well as * Faculty of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences and Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin. ** Max Planck Digital Library. *** ADAPT Centre, KDEG, School of Computer Science & Statistics, Trinity College Dublin. The Taste of “Data Soup” and the Creation of a Pipeline for Transnational Historical Research Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, vol. 1, 108 enabling the increasingly widespread transnational approaches to history. The Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archival Research Infrastructure (CENDARI) Project has the intersection of these trends at its core, reimagining the analogue landscape of research sources for medieval and modern history (specifically the First World War) and infrastructure for a digital age. The conceptual design of the CENDARI environment was informed by two interlinked processes. The first of these was a desk research and survey phase with the goal of capturing the historian’s own perspectives on the processes and practices by which they engage with their sources. Particular emphasis was placed in this process on the impact of transnational approaches on researcher engagement with their source material. Although the concept of the “transnational” has been a part of historical inquiry for almost a century, its durability as a concept has not led to consensus around regarding the scope or meaning of transnationality as a distinct form of historical practice. For some, it is viewed as a characteristic of the object of study, with, for example, the Red Cross occupying a firmly defined space outside of but interconnected with the national. For others, it is a more complex reflection of the interaction between the generation of modern scholars and their scholarship (Winter 2014). Regardless of how we define it or bound it, however, transnational approaches to history seem appropriate not only to the era in which we find ourselves, but also to Europe as a federation of distinct cultural spaces, in which historians have a particular sensitivity toward fragmentation and diversity (Clavin 2010). As might be expected, the largely national organization of traditional knowledge infrastructures (libraries, archives, and museums) was not felt to be a particularly good fit for the approaches seeking to emphasize transnational phenomena: in fact many researchers felt that they needed to take care not to let national narratives inherent in archival structures affect their research outcomes (Beneš et al. 2014). The potential inherent in the digitization of content to resolve these issues is largely still just that: a potential. In spite of the massive increase in availability of content (a key asset for the modern historian), many important archives and collections remain “hidden” because of their scale, lack of budget to digitize resources, lack of accessible finding aids, or other political factors. These factors hamper attempts by historians to take balanced transnational approaches. Finally, the research in this phase of the CENDARI fundamental work also highlighted the heterogeneous nature of historical sources: while the historians interviewed did show some bias toward the use of archival sources, the importance of library-based and other sources was also confirmed (Beneš et al. 2014). This finding seems to go hand in hand with the emphasis on the importance of personal relationships with content-holding institutions, and the fact that a good relationship with the right librarian or archivist could make or break a project. These factors in particular highlight the difficulties inherent in transferring analogue historical research processes to the digital environment, as it is precisely these serendipitous and dialogic The Taste of “Data Soup” and the Creation of a Pipeline for Transnational Historical Research Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, vol. 1, 109 encounters between individuals and between sources from different origins (often catalogued according to different standards) that are the hardest to reinvent in virtual space. The second prong of the CENDARI project’s approach to designing for its users was implemented via a participatory design methodology, allowing a balanced and gradual convergence between the established analogue practices and the emerging technical specifications. This staged approach began with three very high-level design sessions (resulting in video prototypes created by the participants), then moved through the development of user stories (in the form of responses to the statement “I want to ... so that I can ...”) and user scenarios. The scenarios were far more detailed than the stories, while still deploying the same basic approach of translating complex researcher descriptions of their work into a series of statements able to be validated through a test case or input/output relationship. The final stage of the process involved the thorough co-development of system workflows for two “prototype” research questions (one medieval, one modern). The results of these investigations have driven the project toward a design based on the idea that a digital research infrastructure is quite different from a library “on the net,” or indeed from the current paradigm for a digital library. This distinction informs CENDARI’s basic vision, making it a project very much of its time and place as a European infrastructure project. As such, it seeks to facilitate work without defining narrowly how that work must be done; it seeks to federate access to sources without replicating the access and preservation missions of the collection-holding institutions; and it seeks to align itself with best practices across a number of the research fields involved in its development, including computer science, information management, and medieval and modern history (Edmond 2013). The architecture of the system itself is therefore based on a number of key principles arising out of the methodological research and design process. First of all, the system had to be able to manage a variety of data types and standards in a single environment. This heterogeneous information environment was a key requirement from the historians, in particular in the context of pursuing transnational approaches (where comparable data might need to be found in proxies rather than directly equivalent data sets). This requirement is not one that current data standards facilitate particularly well (with different standards dominant between archives and libraries) and gave rise to the characterization of the CENDARI environment as “data soup,” a hearty mixture of objects, descriptions, and sources. It was also very clear that linking information, in particular via notes and annotations, was a key researcher task for which satisfactory tools were not available. The project took this as a mandate not only to develop a VRE environment for the purpose, but also to ensure that maximal benefit was drawn from semantic web and linked-data approaches to capturing and registering individual and shared knowledge. A fundamental challenge is the recognition that two files can each, separately, fully conform to the same specification but still The Taste of “Data Soup” and the Creation of a Pipeline for Transnational Historical Research Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, vol. 1, 110 require substantially different processes to be ingested into a uniform knowledge base. The difference between data (digital representation of the content), information (the order and structure of the content), and knowledge (the semantics and significance of the content) is at the heart of this difficulty: the human brain traverses levels of interpretation with a fluid transparency that computational approaches cannot even begin to emulate. The infrastructure challenge is to lay down a network of data, information, and knowledge ra