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Toward a characterization of digital humanities research collections: A contrastive analysis of technical designs
Author(s) -
Fenlon Katrina
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
proceedings of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.193
H-Index - 14
ISSN - 2373-9231
DOI - 10.1002/pra2.2017.14505401010
Subject(s) - scholarship , digital humanities , digital scholarship , reading (process) , thematic analysis , computer science , thematic structure , data science , face (sociological concept) , thematic map , world wide web , humanities , sociology , linguistics , qualitative research , art , social science , political science , geography , cartography , law , programming language , philosophy
Scholarship across disciplines is changing in the face of digital methodologies, novel forms of evidence and new communication technologies. In the humanities, scholars are confronting and often pioneering innovative ways of viewing, reading, interacting with, collecting, interpreting, contextualizing and sharing their sources, including digital primary sources and data derivatives. This paper reports on one piece of a multimodal study that aims to help us characterize an important, still evolving genre of digital scholarship: the thematic research collection. Using a close, systematic analysis of collections' data models and infrastructures, this study considers the questions: How do the technical designs of thematic research collections contribute to their purposes, functions and uses? What do variations in their designs teach us about the genre as a whole? An analysis of the purposes and designs of scholar‐built collections of humanities evidence has implications for the development of digital collections and aggregations generally and the future shapes of digital scholarship and communication.