New White Paper From ARL: Integrating Digital Humanities into the Web of Scholarship with SHARE

The white paper linked to below was published today by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).

Title

Integrating Digital Humanities into the Web of Scholarship with SHARE

Authors

Cynthia Hudson-Vitale
Penn State University Libraries

Judy Ruttenberg
Association of Research Libraries

Matthew Harp
Arizona State University Library

Rick Johnson
Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame

Joanne Paterson
Western Libraries, Western University

Jeffrey Spies
221B

From the Executive Summary:

This white paper reports the findings of a two-year project investigating the value SHARE could have for digital humanities scholars. SHARE is an open-source community that develops tools and services to connect related research outputs for new kinds of scholarly discovery. This project, partly funded by a grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities, explored how scholars promote discovery of their own digital humanities work, and how they find digital scholarship or its components for their own use.

Key Findings

Survey of Digital Humanist’s Workflow

An online survey captured the full workflows of 42 different DH projects. Workflow questions used the TaDiRAH research activity terms: Capture, Creation, Enrichment, Analysis, Interpretation, Storage, Dissemination, and Meta-Activities. A full report and analysis of the survey is in Appendix B.

Key findings from the survey include the following:

• More than 100 different tools and software were used across the identified projects. The greatest variety of tools and software was found in the Create/Capture phase of the DH workflow, where 50 distinct tools were in use. Activities under these headings include imaging, recording, writing, translating, programming, web development, and more.

• More than 71% of survey respondents indicated their willingness to share their DH project assets in some way. Respondents also indicated they were most likely to share the raw assets that were captured through the digitization process or created through the project period. The majority of respondents shared their assets on GitHub and on personal websites.

• Some respondents reported on projects in fields not usually considered to be humanities, such as sociology and anthropology. While additional research is necessary, this supports the idea that digital humanities scholarship or methods may be discipline agnostic, and not tied to the traditional divisions of research in academia.

• Respondents were asked to rank 12 potential search filters on a Likert scale of “not at all important” to “extremely important.” The most important filter, or search criteria, was whether the project was open access.

Direct to Full Text Document
121 pages; PDF.

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