Being part of the team building a new research platform:
Europeana Research as a space of collaboration, experimentation and research (#dhiha6)
Eliza Papaki
Digital Curation Unit, IMIS-Athena Research Centre
Digital Humanities experiments: what does this mean? Or even, what does it include? What characteristics should a research initiative have in order to be considered as a Digital Humanities endeavour?
Let’s say that Digital Humanities experiments could be any attempt for conducting steps of the research lifecycle digitally or in an innovative way employing digital tools and services (Palmer et al., 2009). It could even be any research initiative producing a digital outcome, resulting for example in data visualization, digital publishing or to a digital platform. Again, is that all?
While more and more scholars discuss “what is Digital Humanities” (more such discussions and answers can be found here), my contribution to the blog carnival on Experiments in Digital Humanities will focus on my involvement and the methodology applied for supporting the user needs of the Humanities and Social Sciences in the newly-built Europeana Research platform, in the context of the project Europeana Cloud.
Working in the Work Package 1 of the project Europeana Cloud on “Assessing Researcher Needs in the Cloud and Ensuring Community Engagement” since its beginning in 2013, a series of methodological tasks were undertaken for documenting researchers’ needs and formulating user requirements to be supported via the new Europeana Research platform.
Desk research
First task I was involved in was a literature review on digital research practices, tools and content. The aim was to analyse the state of the art of digital research practices, tools and content for the Humanities and Social Sciences research communities through background literature, past and current research projects in the area of Digital Humanities. This step would serve as an exploratory stage for the following methodological approaches on understanding, documenting and formulating User Requirements to be served through the platform.
Case Studies
The desk research was followed by case studies on the actual use of innovative digital tools and services in both research communities. Working in a multidisciplinary group based in three institutions (Trinity College Dublin, University of Gothenburg and Digital Curation Unit-IMIS Athena Research Centre), my contribution focused on two satellite cases on Education researchers in Greece who employed digital tools (NVivo, Voyant) in their research, mainly for data analysis and visualization. By analysing actual cases of how researchers within the disciplines of Education, Art History and Sociology work with three innovative digital tools, the cases were selected through what can be referred to as purposive sampling, that is, the cases were selected as illustrative specimen to provide a useful basis for discussion. This work provided information on actual researchers in Europe (different professional status, institutions and research field) and their use of innovative digital tools further complemented by satellite cases concluding to recommendations.
Web Survey
Third task: the Research Communities Web Survey. This Survey functioned as the confirmatory stage of all previous methodological approaches for identifying User Requirements through literature and qualitative research. Being in the team designing, running and analysing the Web Survey, it was designed to measure specific aspects of the research activity, such as the use of specific services, the research activities to which the users engage, the content as well as the properties of the resources favored by the users.
Expert Fora
Three Expert Fora were held during the course of the Europeana Cloud project, running in parallel with the research tasks presented before, each having different aim and target audience.
Expert Forum 1 (June 2013) aimed to investigate the uses for Europeana by researchers in both the Humanities and the Social Sciences by developing case studies that reflect the typical needs of researchers at whom Europeana Cloud will be aimed. The case studies developed through the outcomes of this Forum examined both Europeana in its current form and as Europeana as it could be as it moves into developing cloud services.
Expert Fora 2 and 3 (October, November 2013) looked specifically at tools that could be developed within Europeana Cloud for the Humanities and the Social Sciences respectively. Both fora had two themes; (a) what kinds of tools would be useful, and could potentially be developed, for humanists and social scientists, carrying out research on the Europeana material; and (b) what content in Europeana is useful as it stands, what gaps exist and, most importantly, what changes in addition to Europeana content could encourage future research in both disciplines.
And finally, the platform Europeana Research
All these methodological iterations for:
· Shaping a thorough understanding of the state of the art on scholarly content use, research practices and digital tools,
· More in depth examinations of actual cases and real work scenarios and needs,
· And quantitative recorded views of the community
have led to the creation of the new platform Europeana Research.
Its aim?
To help with issues of licencing, interoperability and access of data, liberating cultural heritage for use in research.
How?
· By building focussed aggregations of content, particularly full-text,
· Exposing Europeana’s aggregations of text and metadata to allow research teams and infrastructures to build specific tools and services,
· Linking disparate collections and tools in different institutions and building workflows between them,
· Highlighting collections in the Europeana dataset of specific interest to researchers,
· And working with other research infrastructures (e.g. DARIAH and CLARIN) to tackle big strategic issues.
Being part of the team for formulating the user requirements of the research community and building a researchers’ network followed by work on the actual outcome of the digital platform, build to serve the community and its needs, has been a fascinating journey! And it could be even said that this example embodies a Digital Humanities experiment.
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