This paper reports on research of scholarly research practices and requirements conducted in the context of the Preparing DARIAH European e-Infrastructures project, with a view to ensuring current and future fitness for purpose of the planned digital infrastructure, services and tools. It summarises the findings of earlier research, primarily from the field of human information behaviour as applied in scholarly work, it presents a conceptual perspective informed by cultural-historical activity theory, it introduces briefly a formal conceptual model for scholarly research activity compliant with CIDOC CRM, it describes the plan of work and methodology of an empirical research project based on open-questionnaire interviews with arts and humanities researchers, and presents illustrative examples of segmentation, tagging and initial conceptual analysis of the empirical evidence. Finally, it presents plans for future work, consisting, firstly, of a comprehensive re-analysis of interview segments within the framework of the scholarly research activity model, and, secondly, of the integration of this analysis with the extended digital curation process model we presented in earlier work.

The need for a firm understanding of the working practices of researchers in the humanities emerges as a prerequisite for the development of effective digital research infrastructures. This paper will focus on the rationale behind the design and implementation of two related studies conducted in the context of two European e-Infrastructures projects, DARIAH and EHRI. Within DARIAH the challenge involved conducting, analysing and understanding research practices of arts and humanities researchers, a largely ill-defined community encompassing a wide spectrum of disciplines. Each of them deals with a variety of objects employing an extensive number of methods. In the context of EHRI, the challenge is slightly different, due to the involvement of a better-defined research community. Holocaust researchers share wellidentified objects, common ground on methods, and handle similar setbacks. In this paper we discuss the approach adopted for designing and implementing qualitative user-centric studies aimed at capturing activities, methods, and types of information objects employed by researchers grounded in identified research goals and questions. It addresses both generic and specific entities and processes, and supports the understanding of researchers' working practices in settings as diverse and wide as DARIAH, or as specialized as EHRI. The outcomes of the analysis of working practices are used in determining user requirements for digital infrastructures to serve the respective research communities.

Digital Humanities might appear a recent phenomenon. Yet almost seventy years have gone by since Father Roberto Busa initiated his Digital Humanities project: the computerassisted lemmatization of the complete Thomistic corpus (http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/). Although Busa first conceived of this project in 1946, it took him nearly four decades to realize it; leveraging the power of the digital computer as an ordering machine capable of processing and listing potentially infinite amounts of textual data. The development of the first computational analysis of archaeological materials, a numerical classification of Eurasian Bronze axes conducted by Jean-Claude Gardin and Peter Ihm in the late 1950s (Cowgill 1967; Huggett 2013) introduced a different aspect of computer-based research: one that brought to the fore the possibilities afforded by digital methods for dimension reduction, discovery and visualization of latent structures of complex data. Fast-forwarding to the present day, two surprisingly distinct communities have already emerged in digital arts and humanities research. On the one hand, Digital Humanities, at least until very recently, appeared preoccupied with transforming the traditions of textbased humanities computing, drawn directly from library collections and scholarly practice. Digital Heritage, on the other hand, has drawn more from theories and practices in digital archaeology and the digital representation of material culture but has often gained attention for its adoption of cutting-edge visualization and virtual reality technology. While driven by the traditions of custodian institutions such as museums, galleries, libraries, and archives and special collections, Digital Heritage leverages the capabilities of contemporary technologies in visualizing and representing cultural objects beyond text, and occasionally borrows ideas from the entertainment industry. Digital Heritage might influence Digital Humanities in terms of lessons learnt from visualization, scanning / recording, 3D photorealistic modelling, GPS and mapping technologies, and possibly even instructional design and serious game development. But Digital 1 This is the author-formatted, pre-publication draft of Benardou, Agiatis, Erik Champion, Costis Dallas, and Lorna M. Hughes (2018) Introduction: a critique of digital practices and research infrastructures. In

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