Toward a characterization of digital humanities research collections: A contrastive analysis of technical designs

Abstract

Scholarship across disciplines is changing in the face of digital methodologies, novel forms of evidence and new communication technologies. In the humanities, scholars are confronting and often pioneering innovative ways of viewing, reading, interacting with, collecting, interpreting, contextualizing and sharing their sources, including digital primary sources and data derivatives. This paper reports on one piece of a multimodal study that aims to help us characterize an important, still evolving genre of digital scholarship: the thematic research collection. Using a close, systematic analysis of collections' data models and infrastructures, this study considers the questions: How do the technical designs of thematic research collections contribute to their purposes, functions and uses? What do variations in their designs teach us about the genre as a whole? An analysis of the purposes and designs of scholar-built collections of humanities evidence has implications for the development of digital collections and aggregations generally and the future shapes of digital scholarship and communication.

Purpose, completeness, and evidential source: Typological signposts in the collections landscape

“…They included characteristics such as the theme or subject of a collection, the various purposes of a collection, the developmental stage of collections, the intended audiences, the heterogeneity of items within a collection, collection size and scope, topical and spatial coverage, modes of access, etc. The full set of properties and their sources are given in Fenlon (2017b).…”

Digital Research Collection – Principles and the Case of the Ethnological Collection of Research Reports

“…The term that directly relates to the interrelation of discrete items is digital research collection, a unique collection of primary sources and other materials gathered by scholars to support research on a theme (Fenlon, 2017). Unsworth extensively defined it as a large-scale interdisciplinary electronic resource, structured but open-ended, diverse in datatypes but thematically coherent, and designed to support research purposes (Unsworth, 2000).…”

Creating Structure in Web Archives with Collections: Different Concepts from Web Archivists

“…Much work exists in analyzing the use and creation of collections. Fenlon [11] performed an in-depth study of two digital collections, detailing different approaches to data models, supporting context, and overall visualization of content. She notes that all collection curators may learn from the structures of existing digital collections.…”

“…Our goal is not to prescribe how a collection should be designed, but rather to understand the different collection structures already in existence. Thus, we reviewed the collection structures of Archive-It 7 , the National Library of Australia's (NLA) PANDORA 8 and Trove 9 archives, the Croatian Web Archive (HAW) 10 , the Library of Congress Web Archive (LC), the United Kingdom Web Archive (UKWA) 11 , Conifer 12 (formerly Webrecorder [27]). Finally, we include the Internet Archive's 13 (IA) user account web archives because IA's Wayback Machine is synonymous with web archiving, even though its collections are tied to a specific user rather than a theme.…”

“…• RQ2: What do these distinct collection structure approaches have in common? Existing work has focused on the nature of digital collections [11], user behavior when curating personal collections [30,41], the behavior of archivists [34], the capabilities of web archive platforms [31], and the challenges of building collections with Archive-It [10,37]. Our work augments this by focusing on existing web archive collection structures for the benefit of future archivists as well as web archive platform and analytics tool designers.…”