Integrating Diverse Research in a Digital Library Focused on a Single Author

Abstract

Abstract. The works of a significant author are accompanied by a variety of artifacts ranging from the scholarly to the popular. In order to better support the needs of the scholarly community, digital libraries focused on the life and works of a particular author must be designed to assemble, integrate, and present the full scope of these artifacts. Drawing from our experiences with the Cervantes Project, we describe five intersecting domains that are common to similarly focused humanities research projects. Integrating the tools needed and the artifacts produced by each of these domains enables digital libraries to provide unique connections between diverse research communities.

Expanding a Humanities Digital Library: Musical References in Cervantes’ Works

“…They are typically created by a single editor or by the highly coordinated efforts of a group of authors working under the guidance of an editorial board. Such editions do not allow for the more complex types of informational needs that are required to support a more broadly defined humanities research agenda, such as that of the Cervantes Project [2]. This type of work is open ended and difficult to restrict to a closed set of scholarly perspectives-new research directions continually pop up, often initiated by people outside of the core project members.…”

“…The sheer magnitude of many digital collections (e.g., the Gutenberg Project [17], the Christian Classics Ethereal Library [26], the Making of America [8] [22]) make detailed hand editing unaffordably labor intensive, while the very nature of the project often conflicts with the traditional goal of producing a final, fixed edition. Previously, we have described the multifaceted nature of humanities collections focused on a single author and argued that these projects will require automatic integration of many types of documents, drawn from many sources, compiled by many independent scholars, in support of many audiences [2]. Such collections are continuously evolving.…”