Thematic Research Collections: Libraries and the Evolution of Alternative Digital Publishing in the Humanities

Abstract

The growth and evolution of digital scholarship in the humanities has produced new genres of scholarly work and publication, reliant upon new ways of representing and sharing evidence, analysis, and interpretation. Meanwhile, extant systems of scholarly communication, including publication, discovery, access-provision, maintenance, and preservation, too often exclude digital research products, to the potential detriment of the entire scholarly record. This paper considers one genre of digital humanities scholarship: the thematic research collection, a digital collection of primary sources gathered to support research on a theme. This genre is recognizable and increasingly common, yet wildly heterogeneous in precise form, function, and purpose. This typological analysis aims to identify and describe types of collections as a way toward comprehending the range, variation, and complexity of the whole genre. The research considers what thematic research collections are, how they work, and what challenges confront the provision of effective and ongoing access to digital scholarship.

Modeling Digital Humanities Collections as Research Objects

“…The analysis presented in this paper builds upon an ongoing, multimodal study of digital collections [12,13]. The study seeks to thoroughly characterize DH collections as a scholarly genre using three approaches: (1) a survey and typological analysis of DH collections (n=150 to date); (2) a qualitative content analysis of exemplary collections; and (3) interviews with researchers and practitioners who build digital collections, to identify challenges for libraries and other institutions in supporting and sustaining DH scholarship.…”

“…The typological analysis identified three primary types, useful for describing DH collections in terms of their purposes and the completeness toward which they are developed; those types are briefly described in Table 1. Complete results of the first phase of the study and a detailed account of the interrelated methods are given in [13].…”

“…Digital libraries-including data repositories, aggregations of cultural records and artifacts, and certain publication platforms-are important components of research infrastructure in the humanities. While the capacity of digital libraries for representing complex digital objects and workflows continues to advance [6,20,29], there remains an urgent need for data models and standards to represent and describe increasingly complex scholarly products [13,19].…”

“…Data modeling is a pervasive scholarly practice in DH [16]. Like research objects, DH collections may be conceptualized and modeled as assemblages of resources with semantic interconnections, designed to support research objectives [4,13]. This study considers to what extent that resemblance bears out in the application of the research objects data model to complete representation of collections.…”

“…This study offers a starting point for answering the question: To what extent may existing (scientific) data models for representing research objects accommodate DH research products and processes? This paper focuses on a common form in DH scholarship: digital collections (often called digital archives and thematic research collections), which are scholar-built aggregations of digital sources of evidence about a topic [12,15,27]. This study provides selected results of a qualitative content analysis of DH collections, and offers a content/context analytical framework to characterize collection components and their interrelationships.…”