Information management in the humanities: Scholarly processes, tools, and the construction of personal collections

Abstract

The promise and challenge of information management in the humanities has garnered a great deal of attention and interest (Bulger et al., ; Freiman et al., ; Trace & Karadkar, ; University of Minnesota Libraries, ; Wilson & Patrick, ). Research libraries and archives, as well as groups from within the humanities disciplines themselves, are being tasked with providing robust support for information management practices, including helping to engage humanities scholars with appropriate digital technologies in ways that are sensitive to disciplinary‐based cultures and practices. However, significant barriers impede this work, primarily because the infrastructure (services, tools, and collaborative networks) to support scholarly information management is still under development. Under the aegis of the Scholars Tracking Archival Resources (STAR) project we are studying how humanities scholars gather and manage primary source materials with a goal of developing software to support their information management practices. This article reports the findings from our interviews with 26 humanities scholars, in conjunction with a set of initial requirements for a mobile application that will support scholars in capturing documents, recreating the archival context, and uploading these documents to cloud storage for access and sharing from other devices.

‘Go fish’: Conceptualising the challenges of engaging national web archives for digital research

“…Within the humanities, this work is best embodied by efforts to identify so-called 'scholarly primitives' (Unsworth, 2000) -or the 'basic functions common to scholarly activity across [humanities] disciplines' (Blanke & Hedges, 2013 p. 655) -and translate them into specific infrastructural or technology interventions that facilitate these practices within digital research. Unsworth initially describes several primitives (Discovering, Annotating, Comparing, Referring), which have been expanded and refined by others investigating user experience design and digital tool development (Blanke & Hedges, 2013;Trace & Karadkar, 2017). Other work in web archives has similarly focused on developing 'task models' or 'process models' for big data tools, most recently with the FEAV model (Filter, Extract, Aggregate and Visualize), which was developed in conjunction with the Archives Unleashed Toolkit (Jackson et al, 2016;Lin et al, 2017;Ruest et al, 2020).…”

Digging into data management in public‐funded, international research in digital humanities

“…The field remains capacious, embracing information practices such as archiving, quantitative analysis, tool‐building, visualization, 3D modeling, sonification, curation, manipulation, interpretation, editing, modeling, mapping, reading, mining, gaming, remixing, publishing, critiquing, collaborating, code studies, and databases—often at unprecedented scale and scope (Burdick, ; Davidson, ; Hayles, ; Klein & Gold, ; Poole, , ; Trace & Karadkar, ). Often trained in traditional disciplines, DH scholars may occupy traditional faculty positions, but in addition to or instead of these positions, many undertake hybrid information work involving a wide range of digital data, resources, methods, activities, and tools (Clement & Carter, ; Given & Willson, ).…”

Assessing Indonesian University Students’ Preferences on Mendeley Reference Manager for Scientific Writing

“…Mendeley makes organization and browsing easy as well as the capturing metadata were the most popular items in the category of 'organize your content.' To a great extent, the capture dwells distant from ideal [16]. This research indicated many Mendeley users are importing papers from the existing library.…”