Interacting with Digital Documents

Abstract

The aim of this study was to find out what is historians' taskbased information interaction like in digital environments. The study was based on TBII framework [20]. The research was conducted in real-life setting using interview and shadowing. The following task process types were identified: (i) searching secondary sources, (ii) reading and making notes, (iii) collecting and processing data, (iv) analyzing and (v) writing. We found that IR interfaces were not always optimal for historians' use, and that the interfaces should support the expression of information needs better. The data processing consumes a lot of historians' time and they could benefit from designing better tools. We also found out that task process types have an effect on how digital tools or data are being used. Therefore, the context in which the tool or data is being used, should be taken into account when designing tools for historians.

Integrated interdisciplinary workflows for research on historical newspapers: Perspectives from humanities scholars, computer scientists, and librarians

“…The aim of this paper is to shed light on integrated interdisciplinary research between the curator, the humanities researcher, and the computer scientist, motivated by their shared vision of finding meaning in data. Much has been written about research with digital cultural heritage from a (digital) humanities scholars' perspective (e.g., Allen & Sieczkiewicz, 2010 ; Korkeamäki & Kumpulainen, 2019 ; Milligan, 2019 ), a (digital) librarian's perspective (e.g., Caffo, 2014 ; Millson‐Martula & Gunn, 2017 ), or a computer scientist's perspective (e.g., Koolen et al, 2009 ; Van den Bosch et al, 2009 ) separately. Some papers also bring together the viewpoints of at least two of the disciplines involved.…”

“…For them, to be able to control each step in the research process applying traditional source (as well as tool, method, interface, etc.) criticism seems crucial and it explains why they are sometimes loath to trust the algorithms “to do their magic” (Korkeamäki & Kumpulainen, 2019 ).…”

“…With the advance of digitization and with more elaborate algorithms, tools, and methods developed by computer scientists, digital approaches have started to shape humanities' and especially historians' research, whose goal it is to study the past by exploring, analyzing, interpreting, and contextualizing primary sources such as newspaper articles (Korkeamäki & Kumpulainen, 2019 ; Oberbichler et al, 2020 ). Some historians need to create collections for further qualitative analysis (e.g., Gabrielatos, 2007 ) or use digital tools to support their qualitative research questions (e.g., Brait, 2020 ; Oberbichler, 2020a ; Pfanzelter, 2020 ), some use text mining methods to identify linguistic patterns (Marjanen, Kurunmäki, et al, 2020 ), and others again study geographically distributed phenomena (Borruso, 2008 ).…”

Optical character recognition quality affects subjective user perception of historical newspaper clippings

“…They concluded “ that the current knowledge situation on the users’ side as well as on the tool makers ' and data providers ' side is insufficient and needs to be improved ” with respect to the data quality. In the interviews of Korkeamäki and Kumpulainen (2019; Late and Kumpulainen, 2021), historians were asked of their task-based information interaction in digital environments. Some of the interviewed researchers worked a lot with historical optically read texts and some mentioned problems with the quality of data, especially in the analysis phase of the data: “ Especially when using big data, historians had to evaluate the impact of the noisy OCR on the results and if the analysis is worth doing ” (Korkeamäki and Kumpulainen, 2019).…”

Answering Event-Related Questions over Long-Term News Article Archives

“…With the application of digital preservation techniques, more and more old news articles are being digitized and made accessible online. News article archives help users to learn detailed information on events that occurred at specific time points in the past and constitute part of our heritage [1]. Some professionals, like historians, sociologists, or journalists need to deal with these time-aligned document collections for a variety of purposes [2].…”