Evaluating a digital humanities research environment: the CULTURA approach

Abstract

Digital humanities initiatives play an important role in making cultural heritage collections accessible to the global community of researchers and general public for the first time. Further work is needed to provide useful and usable tools to support users in working with those digital contents in virtual environments. The CULTURA project has developed a corpus agnostic research environment integrating innovative services that guide, assist and empower a broad spectrum of users in their interaction with cultural artefacts. This article presents (1) the CULTURA system and services and the two collections that have been used for testing and deploying the digital humanities research environment, and (2) an evaluation methodology and formative evaluation study with apprentice researchers. An evaluation model was developed which has served as a common ground for systematic evaluations of the CULTURA environment with user communities around the two test bed collections. The evaluation method has proven to be suitable for accommodating different evaluation strategies and allows meaningful consolidation of evaluation results. The evaluation outcomes indicate a positive perception of CULTURA. A range of useful suggestions for future improvement has been collected and fed back into the development of the next release of the research environment

Confluence between library and information science and digital humanities in Spain. Methodologies, standards and collections

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Exploring Linked Data for the Automatic Enrichment of Historical Archives

“…We are not the first to attempt to decipher the contents of the depositions using computational methods. The CULTURA project [16] developed and applied a range of tools to provide a personalised experience for individuals who are interested in exploring the collection. This project was extremely successful and produced a number of valuable utilities for working with collections of this nature.…”

Realizing an Applied Gaming Ecosystem: Towards Supporting Service-Based Innovation Knowledge Management and Transfer

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